Mary M. Lane

Museum-goers, this author included, are often guilty of walking past still life paintings of food, dismissing them as dull and anodyne. Yet, taking in the context of when they were created, these…

This author has been to a number of museums in the world and never has she found a gem as hidden as the Walters Art Museum. Tucked away in a corner of Baltimore, the Walters is the kind of museum…

Skeptics of the American Dream likely will consider Emanuel Leutze’s masterpiece depicting George Washington crossing the Delaware River to be a propagandistic romanticizing of America, a work…

Western art history is filled with colorful characters, whose statuses as heroes or villains can change based on the mores of our current society. The "Reframed" column is not a politically…

Easily the most famous depiction of famine in art history is Vincent van Gogh’s 1885 oil painting, The Potato Eaters. At the time of its creation, the phrase "potato eater" was considered pejorative…

It is an understandable human instinct to treat any crisis as if it were the first of its kind. A century ago, those fears revolved around a widening gap between rich and poor, a global pandemic, and…

Upon its creation, Quidor’s painting was widely panned by art critics for being too dark and focusing more on the woodland nature than on the chase. In many ways, this was a clever choice by Quidor,…

Saints canonized by the Catholic Church come mostly from two major categories: those who lived with or were martyred for Jesus Christ, and those in the centuries since whom performed miracles.…

This self-portrait, exhibited in Paris in 1895, came with a caption from an unnamed male art critic noting that “this woman” often had critics assume the work had been painted by a man, because no…

In the U.S. Capitol, amidst the statues of controversial politicians and military figures that protestors stormed past in January, stand several statues of quiet American heroes and heroines who are…

In the special collection of brittle works on paper at the Boston Athenaeum lies Paul Revere’s 1770 hand-colored engraving, The Bloody Massacre.

At what point can an object become art? The opinion that the original "Star-Spangled Banner" is now a work of art is the tried and true view of this "Art & Object" columnist.

Dürer was only thirty or thirty-one when he completed the work. Dying at age fifty-six, he prolifically completed over 300 prints, 1000 delicate drawings, and 100 paintings for which twenty-first-…