There is a field that drops down to reveal a view of an older neighborhood from the backyards and the alley. You see a line of garages and the rear view of a row of houses behind them. Beyond them stand the overgrown trees that shade the neighborhood and can be seen all the way to the horizon.

ROBERT S. DUNCANSON: EARLY AFRICAN-AMERICAN ARTIST There were several communities of free blacks throughout the north and south in antebellum America. The communities supported a number of thriving businesses from doctors and barbers to ministers and pharmacists. There were even a number of artists to come out of these communities…

REGIONALISM French Impressionism ushered in a brave new world of art and within fifty years of its beginnings, the art world was watching the rise of landscape paintings by Picasso and Matisse. The center of this creative hurricane was Paris but its effects could be felt in other European cities…

In recent weeks, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have been making the rounds of the bookstores, radio talk shows and university lecture halls promoting their new book on Vincent Van Gogh, which is now a NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. In late 2011, a segment spotlighting the book appeared on…

AMERICA’S FIRST PROFESSIONAL ARTIST/JOHN SMIBERT In the American colonies’ first hundred years or so, the artists that painted in the colonies where itinerant limners, men who traveled throughout the area, painting portraits, sometimes of prominent people but usually of the unknown settlers of the young colonies. The limners not only…

Two rows of small, Cape Cod houses at the end of fall are shown in this cityscape. They are on either side of a circular road that is displayed from one side. One row of houses line the horizon of the painting while a few houses from the other side can be seen on the right.

IS THIS THE NEW MONA LISA? I am not a person who likes to drain a subject dry but in the past week or so, since I wrote a blog entry on NOVA/PBS’ documentary on an attempt to validate a sketch by Leonardo Da Vinci, the Renaissance painter has become…

THE LUMINISTS The first wave of Hudson River artists were a handful of men who traveled up the river to visit and paint the sights as the Hudson coursed through the mountains, palisades and hills of upstate New York. But once the Erie Canal and the railroads brought a vast…