Held annually on the first Monday in May, the Met Gala is the primary fundraiser for the Costume Institute, housed within the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The accompanying exhibition, titled Costume Art, juxtaposes clothing and art objects from across the museum’s collection, highlighting the body. The 2026 Met Gala dress code was “Fashion is Art,” asking attendees and designers: What’s the last piece of art that inspired you?

1. Ciara: Inspired by the Bust of Nefertiti

Singer Ciara reached back over 3,000 years for her inspiration. The ancient Egyptian bust of Queen Nefertiti has achieved iconic status, frequently referenced in pop culture from the styling in 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein to Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance. Discovered in 1912 in Amarna, it’s believed to have been created by a sculptor named Thutmose around 1345 BC. Her image has long been considered a representation of feminine beauty and power.

Nefertiti earned that designation not only in death, but also during her life. She was the royal wife of King Akhenaten during the powerful and wealthy 18th Dynasty of Egypt’s pharaonic period. She was instrumental in the major political and religious upheaval under Akhenaten’s rule. They radically altered the state religion to a monotheistic practice centered on the solar god Aten. They also built an entirely new capital city at Amarna that was quickly abandoned after Akhenaten’s reign. Nefertiti was highly visible in the art of the time. She was even shown in scenes that would have normally been the prerogative of the king, including smiting enemies, and was the first Egyptian woman depicted driving a chariot.

While there are many images of Nefertiti, the bust has endured as a favorite for its impressive detailing, elegance, and good preservation. Like the bust, Ciara’s look by Celia Kritharioti focused on the styling from the chest up. The bust is an artwork so famous that it can easily be identified by its silhouette. Instead of using color, the whole look is gold, perhaps referencing the prestige of the bust.

Nefertiti’s prominent collar necklace with a floral pattern was reinterpreted with thin bands of gold encircling the singer’s shoulders and a thick choker necklace. Instead of the blue crown with colorful ribbons and gold diadem, Ciara opted to model her hair in the shape of the crown with pointed ends, painted in glittering gold. The look was completed with gold earrings and chic shades. In this look, Ciara and designer Celia Kritharioti reimagined the bust through a modern lens, serving beauty, power, and an undeniable cool factor.

2. Kylie Jenner: Inspired by “Venus de Milo”

Another celebrated sculpture served as the inspiration for Kylie Jenner’s look. The Venus de Milo is perhaps the most well-known ancient Greek sculpture in the world. Currently in the Louvre, the work was originally discovered on the Greek Island of Milos in 1820. It was immediately acquired by the French ambassador and brought to France. It is dated to about 150-125 BC.

While the name references Venus, the Roman goddess of love and fertility, it is believed the sculpture actually depicts Aphrodite, her Greek counterpart. Her missing arms leave her identity ambiguous, as the object she once held would have identified her. The goddess is depicted in the classic S-curve body shape of Hellenistic sculptures. The nude torso is polished smooth, in contrast to the stiff folds of the drapery that slips around her hips.

Jenner’s look leaned into the sensuality created by the tension of concealment and exposure. The simple, soft, skin colored bodice was contrasted by a full, elaborately beaded skirt. Instead of mimicking the drapery of the Venus de Milo, the Schiaparelli gown modernized the look by using a classic evening gown of silk fabric and included the upper bust folded down as if the dress was peeling off. She was styled with curled hair and large diamond jewelry. Instead of the ancient goddess of love and sensuality, Jenner walked down the carpet as her Hollywood derivative.

3. Madonna: Inspired by “The Temptation of St. Anthony” by Leonora Carrington

One of the most showstopping moments of the night was Madonna’s massive ensemble by Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent, inspired by Mexican-English artist Leonora Carrington. Painted in 1945, the work is indicative of Carrington’s surrealist approach to both her writing and painting. Born to a wealthy British industrialist, Carrington abandoned her upper-class lifestyle for the avant-garde artists of Paris and New York, living and working with the likes of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. Eventually, she settled in Mexico. She was not only a feminist intellectual but also carved out a unique space in the heart of the surrealist movement.

Interestingly, this painting was created for a contest that pitted her against her fellow surrealist painters. The David L. Loew-Albert Lewin production company held a competition for artists to paint “the temptation of St. Anthony” for their 1947 film, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami. Unfortunately, Carrington wasn’t successful, and Max Ernst won.

Carrington reimagines the story of the Christian monk’s harrowing journey through the Egyptian desert, where he confronts demons and supernatural temptations. The painting is a highly symbolic work typical of the surrealists. St. Anthony is depicted as an old man with multiple faces beneath a billowing monastic robe. Surrounding him are representations of his temptations: a pig, a figure in red with a cauldron, and a small, eerie figure in black, surrounded by women in long robes of various colors, holding out the garment that envelopes her. This figure seems to reflect Carrington’s interest in witchcraft and female power.

Madonna attempted to recreate this part of the scene faithfully, with attention to the symbolic details. She was dressed all in black with a gray sheer fabric covering her ship headdress and flowing outwards. She carried a metal natural horn. Six women silently surrounded her, stretching out the grey veil around her. They didn’t wear the bright colors of Carrington’s women, opting for pastel slip dresses instead. However, the look accurately captured Carrington’s fascination with the occult and leans into her expression of magical realism, existing in reality but reflecting imagination.

4. Angela Bassett: Inspired by “Girl in Pink Dress” by Laura Wheeler Waring

Angela Bassett found inspiration from within the MET Museum itself. Her colorful look was inspired by Laura Wheeler Waring, a black female painter. She was also a lifelong educator and traveled to Paris, where she cultivated her artistic talent and was widely exhibited. Her portraits of black women positioned her as one of the preeminent artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Based in New York City, the Harlem Renaissance was a period of vibrant African American artistic and intellectual achievement that lasted from the late 1910s through the mid-1930s.

Girl in Pink Dress embodies the movement’s focus on rejecting racist stereotypes and centering black dignity and pride. The subject of the portrait is presented as the ideal vision of Jazz Age femininity. Her hair is styled in a fashionable bob. The pink drop-waist dress is adorned with dramatic pink flowers on her shoulder, which elegantly frame her face. Through carefully rendered, on-trend details, the painting places a black woman firmly at the heart of Jazz Age culture.

This is precisely where Bassett found inspiration, the actual fashion that made this portrait so powerful. Her bold pink Prabal Gurung dress also featured a drop waist with a fringed skirt, another nod to Jazz Age fashion. The pink flowers dangled down her shoulder and adorned the bottom of her bodice. She also added a pink tint around her eyes and styled her hair in finger waves in 1920s style. In conversation with Waring’s pink lady, this look also positioned Bassett as the grown-up version of the girl, still at the heart of culture and fashion.

5. Ben Platt: Inspired by “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat.

While many men at the MET Gala still opt for a black suit, Ben Platt was a breath of fresh air. Inspired by A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Tanner Fletcher designed a pastel blue and green suit that evokes the serenity of a Parisian park, with a few subtle details evoking the painting’s significance.

Completed in 1884 by Georges Seurat, this work depicts a cross-section of Parisian society at a park on the banks of the Seine River. The large-scale canvas features babies, elderly men, soldiers, and wealthy women. In the bustling scene, parkgoers are fishing, knitting, playing trumpet, and even taking a pet monkey for a stroll. The composition was carefully thought out, and Seurat did several preparatory studies, one of which is housed at the MET Museum.

In addition to the colorful characters, the unique painting technique has made this one of the most famous paintings of the era. The artist first layered small brushstrokes in complementary colors and then added tiny dots to bring the image to life. The technique is known as Pointillism. It appears solid from a distance, but close up, the viewer can see the tiny dots of varying colors that construct the image.

The designer made reference to this innovative style in the intricate beading and embroidery on Platt’s suit. Like Seurat’s points, each tiny bead and stroke of thread contributes to the dynamic elements when seen from a distance. The designer did not attempt to recreate the entire scene, but only selected two figures for the front of the blazer. On one side, the lady in a tight, fashionable dress holds an umbrella at the top of the path. On the other side, a man lounges casually in the grass, basking in the sun. There is a clear contrast in their attitude and pose, perhaps recalling the wide spectrum of social classes present in Seurat’s painting.

6. Emma Chamberlain: Inspired by Van Gogh and Munch

Emma Chamberlain chose to emulate a style of art, rather than a particular work. Firm in the belief that fashion is art, her Castro Freitas-designed gown was actually hand-painted by artist Anna Deller-Yee, turning her body into a canvas. Some of the reference images Chamberlain and her stylist sent to Deller-Yee included Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night and Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

Van Gogh was a Post-Impressionist Dutch painter working in the mid to late 19th century. Munch was a Norwegian painter active in the late 19th and early 20th century, known for pioneering Expressionism. Despite the fact that they are associated with different artistic movements, time periods, and geographic locations, their works share certain inherent similarities. They used paint to express intense emotional experiences with wide, flowing brushstrokes, thick impasto, and bold colors. The painting style creates a psychological effect, evoking a sense of upheaval and melancholy, but also awe and wonderment.

The references to these artists’ most celebrated paintings are easily read in the dress.

This expressive way of painting was mimicked in the swirling movement of color on Chamberlain’s dress and thick, visceral brushstrokes. Painted onto a flesh-toned body suit, the top starts with bright yellow and mint green, disintegrating into dark reds and blues. The sleeves were nude, but a long fringe began at Chamberlain’s hands and flowed down to the ground, dyed at the bottom with the same deep blue. As with the iconic paintings it evokes, the initial drama and beauty of the dress gave way to something more complex and overwhelming.

7. Lena Dunham: Inspired by “Judith Beheading Holofernes” by Artemisia Gentileschi

Lena Dunham decided on a more abstract approach in referencing a classic work of art. Her inspiration came from the bold work of Artemisia Gentileschi, a female Italian Baroque painter. Not only does the artwork evoke feminist themes, but Gentileschi herself has also become a feminist icon. In a time that largely shut out women from professional artistic work, Gentileschi succeeded as a court painter in Rome, Florence, and Naples, and became the first woman to enroll in the Academy of Art and Design in Florence.

The painting referenced is a bold rendition of the biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes. In the story, Judith heroically assassinates the drunken Assyrian general and frees the people of Israel from Nebuchadnezzar’s army. It was a common theme in Renaissance and Baroque art, but unlike some of the more restrained versions, Gentileschi puts the violence front and center, literally. At the focal point of the work is Holofernes’ head at the moment Judith plunges his own sword into his neck. The contrast of the light of the figures against the dark background highlights the action. Blood squirts and runs down against the white fabric. Judith looks determined while her maidservant exhibits quiet resolve. The women are clearly in charge.

Dunham embraced the confronting nature of this work. Her sequined Valentino gown was an arresting deep red, evoking the blood spatter from Holofernes’ severed neck. Red feathers encompassed her own neck and lined the deep split and long train, erupting outward from the garment. This symbolic approach distilled the painting down to its most powerful essence, the confrontational violence through which these women assert their agency. Dunham, it seems, has found a way to do the same through fashion.

Opera is often considered a high-brow event that only the elite and die-hard fans can understand. However, Philip Glass (b. 1937) stands as a revolutionary figure in the world of opera. Some called him a visionary, others regarded him as the enfant terrible. Glass forged an alternative path in the world of opera through a potent combination of minimalist techniques, collaborations with sought-after names and visionaries, and a commitment to accessibility. We will glance at the history of opera before Philip Glass and discover some of his operas that changed the face of the genre forever.

A Brief History of Opera Before Philip Glass

The history of opera stretches back about 400 years and has taken many meanderings. Opera’s journey began in Italy in the Renaissance and has continued to blossom and grow. The earliest operas feature myths, gods, monsters, and heroes, harking back to an idealized idea of what ancient Greek dramas may have sounded like. Greek and Roman mythology played a large part in these stories.

Renaissance (ca. 1450 to 1650)

Dafne, Jacopo Peri, 1597

The first recorded work that is considered a true opera is Jacopo Peri’s 1597 composition Dafne. Claudio Monteverdi is regarded as the first true genius of opera in the Western world. His opera, Orfeo, tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and was performed in front of an exclusive audience at the Duke of Mantua’s court. However, it was not a sung opera yet. It was delivered in a style known as recitar cantando, or recitative (“speech in song”).

Baroque (ca. 1650 to 1700)

Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt) HWV 17, G.F. Handel, 1724

Opera took Europe by storm, and everyone wanted a piece of the action. It became an expensive affair filled with florid arias and ornate set designs with moving parts. Grandeur and noble simplicity became the catchphrases. Dances, choruses, and a more natural and fluid combination of words skyrocketed opera into the mainstream.

Castrati, male singers who were castrated before puberty to preserve their soprano voices, became the superstars of the day. They had a man’s power and control while displaying a woman’s soprano range. Today, countertenors have taken their place.

Classical Era (ca. 1700 to 1820)

Le Nozze die Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) Opera, W.A. Mozart, 1791

With the Enlightenment sweeping across Europe, gods and monsters took a back seat and opera became more realistic, focusing on people. The music became more streamlined and less ornate. A prime example is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). The opera is based on Beaumarchais’s work on Figaro — a comedic opera with a serious heart: Figaro tries to gain the upper hand over his master and points out inequalities in France. It is said that the play promoted revolutionary ideas that helped to lead towards the French Revolution.

Romantic Era (ca. 1820 to 1900)

Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), Richard Wagner, 19th century

Despite the name, the Romantic Era was not about romance… It was about emotions and the pre-Romantic period, Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) sought to be “tumultuous and [filled with] intense emotions, a refusal to conform to societal norms, and a need to transgress” (Silva, 2022). The ideals of the Sturm and Drang period, especially in Germany, flowed across Europe. Artists across all genres sought to expand their world and give a voice to their feelings. Composers, like Ludwig van Beethoven, broke away from the rigid forms laid down by their predecessors and forged a new path in music.

In Germany, Richard Wagner singlehandedly changed the course of opera. Unfortunately, he was also appropriated by the Nazi Party for their nefarious reasons. He introduced new directions in harmony and expanded the use of the orchestra to convey a range of feelings, and leitmotifs to symbolize people, ideas, and places. The whole opera is based on Wagner’s idea of Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art.” His epic opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, WWV 86, spans four operas and is loosely based on characters from Norse mythology and the Nibelungenlied.

Composers like Puccini and Verdi emphasized emotion and lived experience in their works, like La Bohéme, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot (Puccini), and La Traviata and Rigoletto (by Verdi).

20th Century and Beyond (ca. 1900 Until Today)

Opera has come a long way from its roots in classical Greek dramas having become all-encompassing and grand. The 20th century became loaded with politics and these two soon clashed. The Nazis appropriated Viking legends for their propaganda machine and Hitler adored the works of Wagner.

Joseph Stalin’s communist policies (known as Socialist Realism) included prescribing what all artists could and could not produce. A prime example is Dmitry Shostakovich’s 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which landed him on Stalin’s denounced artists list and in an article in Pravda newspaper. Luckily, Shostakovich survived the attack, and his Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Op. 47 was offered as an apology.

Germany, under the Nazis, also placed restrictions on all forms of art, music, and film — music had to be tonal and free from jazz influences. All forms of art had to exalt the German Motherland and portray racial purity, and obedience. Anything else was considered “degenerate art.”

Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera, Peter Grimes, turns the eye and ear toward the consequences of mob mentality and small-town life. Opera and politics would also turn their attention to momentous events of the 20th century in John Adam’s 1987 opera Nixon in China. As the title suggests, it refers to Nixon’s historic visit to Chairman Mao in China in 1972. Contemporary issues are also highlighted in opera, for example, the American Opera Project and the NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Stonewall Operas which were commissioned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots. The riots sparked the LQBTQ+ rights movement and ignited the Pride movement.

If there is a story to be told, opera makes sure that audiences can enjoy a multisensory experience. The operas of Philip Glass are no different, but he also forged a new path in the opera world.

How Did Philip Glass Revolutionize Opera?

Philip Glass is one of the most influential musicians and composers of the 21st century. He is best known for his minimalist compositions, but his operas are epic masterpieces worthy of any music lover’s attention.

Let us discover how Philip Glass revolutionized opera through his unique minimalist approach and lens.

Einstein on the Beach

Knee Play 1 from Einstein on the Beach, Philip Glass, 1976

Glass composed his first opera, Einstein on the Beach, in 1976. While Glass composed the music, he collaborated with artist Robert Wilson on the libretto. Wilson handled the stage design and directed the production. Instead of following established conventions of plot or narrative arc, Glass’s opera is non-narrative and uses a formalist format.

He threw all the established rules out of the window. Instead of the traditional orchestra, the work is composed for synthesizers, woodwinds, and voices. Audience performances last over five hours without the traditional intermissions — audience members are welcome (and encouraged) to wander in and out of the performance at will.

Further, a series of recurring images are used in juxtaposition to abstract dances to tell the story. Knee Plays, or brief interludes, connect each of the four “scenes.” The fragmented nature of the opera is used to portray the complexities of Einstein’s theories of space and time.

The opera is a culmination of Glass’s minimalist techniques. Repeating musical figures that subtly change as they unfold during a scene creates a hypnotic and meditative atmosphere. Glass uses music to draw the audience into the emotional world of the characters. Combining the aforementioned with rhythm can create a sense of calm or urgency, depending on its use.

Einstein is part art installation, part modern dance, part opera, and a whole avant-garde masterpiece that changed opera and set a new standard for operas in America and the world.

Satyagraha

This 1979 opera and libretto is loosely based on an ancient Sanskrit text taken from the Bhagavad Gita. This was his first traditional opera, using an orchestral lineup with a cast of soloists. It is through-composed, meaning the music avoids repetition, but constantly introduces new melodies, rhythms, and harmonies. It also emphasizes the development of new musical ideas to adapt to the story. Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Richard Strauss’ Salome are examples of this from the early 19th. But that is where the Western tradition ends.

The Kuru Fields of Justice from Stayagrah, by Philip Glass, 1979

Scholars have dubbed the opera a “para-opera” because it opposes the musical and dramatic ideas found in Western music. Rhythms are used to underscore the dramatic events unfolding in the opera. In Glass’s typical minimalist style, short, repeated phrases and rhythms expand and contract — the additive and subtractive processes he learned from Ravi Shankar while transcribing Indian music in Paris during the 1960s. This technique creates the idea of a moment suspended in time.

The imagery used in the opera also adds another layer to this multi-sensory experience. This technique is well-suited to the anachronistic plot which weaves into and out of Mahatma Gandhi’s present life and his past in South Africa, where he stood up against the social injustices of the British.

Akhnaten

While the premise of minimalism is to strip down art to its most basic form, Glass’s approach is anything but emotionally void. The titular role in Akhnaten (1983) is written for a countertenor — something that is almost unheard of in operatic circles.

Today, there are some contemporary works for countertenors, including “Boy” in George Benjamin’s Written on Skin (2012), Trinculo in Thomas Adès The Tempest (2004), and the Refugee in Jonathan’ Dove’s Flight, (1998) to highlight a few. Nowadays, countertenors (or women) are used in period productions instead of castrati.

In Akhnaten the text is derived from ancient writings in Akkadian, Egyptian, and Hebrew. However, instead of a traditional narrative arc, the story is told through a series of tableaux. It is the visual impact that elevates the opera to a multi-sensory experience. Furthermore, the Pharaoh’s Hymn to the Sun is an emotional and moving experience.

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher, by Philip Glass, 1987

“Poe’s famous horror story has fascinated poets, dramatists and composers for over a century. Poe hints at much, but states hardly anything at all. Is the story real, or is it a hallucination? What are [sic] the relationship between the narrator (William), his friend Roderick Usher, and Roderick’s dying sister, Madeline? Has she been buried alive, or is it a demon from hell who takes such a spectacular revenge at the end? And is the vast house in which they live a living malignant entity? Incest, homosexuality, murder, and the supernatural hang in the air, but then again, such things may exist only in the imagination of the audience” (Philip Glass, 2019).

The opera, composed in 1987, is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic masterpiece and short story, The Fall of the House of Usher, published in 1839. Although the opera is based on Poe’s story, Glass regards it as a “score of eighty-five minutes of musical atmosphere with a simple tale at the bottom of it” and the main aim was not to relay a story but to provide a “scope for an emotional examination of Poe’s world.”

Like Einstein, this opera also uses a fragmentary narrative to drive the storyline forward, but it also gives us a glimpse into the psychological world of Roderick Usher. Again, minimalism features strongly in the opera with gradual harmonic and rhythmic shifts. Other times the slow shifts are replaced by quickly changing time signatures combined with the same harmonies in succession.

Another standout feature is Madeline’s near-constant wordless vocalese on the stage — instead of the traditional aria(s) she is ever present on and off the stage. This helps to heighten the psychological underpinnings of the opera.

Final Thoughts

Glass’s unique approach to adapting texts and tales in his storytelling and music inspired new generations of composers to explore the boundaries of opera and open it to a wider audience. His collaborations with legendary names such as Robert Wilson and others throughout his career have driven his operas forward.

Glass specifically writes his operas in a way that allows for clear text declamation, making the words accessible to the audience. The combination of minimalism and a focus on textual clarity continues to push the boundaries of opera. While the music might be minimalist, it gives the visual impact a solid foundation to build upon and express a wide range of emotions.

Although the trilogy of biographical operas (Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten) are epic, long-form works, they still embrace Glass’s minimalist ethos of focusing on rhythm and harmony to drive the storyline forward. The Fall of the House of Usher is one of his shorter works that allows audiences to experience opera without sitting through a lengthy production. His shorter operas make opera accessible to a wider audience and Glass helped to shape the future of the ever-evolving world of opera.

Select Bibliography and Further Reading

Author Events. (2019, July 1). Philip Glass | Words Without Music [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taRFqJSCgLk

Bryan, J. H. (2024). German town; Degenerate Art exhibit in Munich. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1000681 Accessed at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Library of Congress.

Giannini, F., & Baratta, I. (2017, July 19). Entartete Kunst: The Nazi exhibition condemning degenerate art. Finestre sull’Arte. https://www.finestresullarte.info/en/works-and-artists/entartete-kunst-the-nazi-exhibition-condemning-degenerate-art

Glass, P. (2015). Music without words: A memoir. Faber & Faber.

Page, T. (1989). Philip Glass (1989). In Writings on Glass: Essays, interviews, criticism (pp. 3–11). University of California Press.

As an artistic genre, animal painting was never considered to be particularly high and revered, but it was almost universally admired. Yet, one female artist named Rosa Bonheur managed to make a groundbreaking career, becoming the wealthiest artist of her era. Her paintings of cows, horses, rabbits, and lions were filled with tender feelings and confident professionalism. Read on to become familiarized with five important works by Rosa Bonheur.

1. Rosa Bonheur’s Lesser Known Bronzes: A Sheep Resting

Rosa Bonheur was the most famous painter of her time, and perhaps the most successful painter of animals of all time. Her father was an artist too, who encouraged equal and mixed-gender education for all people regardless of their class and age. For that reason, he eagerly trained his four children and arranged opportunities for practice and study.

Rosa Bonheur showed an early inclination towards painting animals. Even in her pre-school years, she learned letters by drawing small images of animals next to the letters that their names corresponded to. Over the years, she developed her passion into a successful career. In her later years, she even arranged for a menagerie of lions and gazelles to be placed in her chateau for her to care for, study, and paint.

Despite being famous for painting, Rosa Bonheur enjoyed working with animal sculpture as well, although he initially resorted to it out of necessity. As a young artist in training, she attended farms and slaughterhouses, studying the anatomy, bones, and muscles of dead animals. Not content enough with the amount of knowledge she received, Bonheur decided to try her hand at dissecting animals. This was a popular practice among not only medical students but also artists of the time, with some even attending human dissections in anatomical theaters. Still, Rosa Bonheur never felt comfortable enough with blood and blades. Seeking an alternative, she resorted to sculpture as a way to study the three-dimensional movement of animals, their body parts, and their range of motion without having to dissect bodies.

2. The Most Famous Work of Rosa Bonheur: The Horse Fair, 1852-55

The Horse Fair was and remains the signature work of Rosa Bonheur, and the one that brought her almost instant fame and recognition. Ambitious about her subject, she approached several patrons, offering them the finished work in exchange for funding, but none of them were ready to put significant funds into a large-scale project of a horse market. While working on the painting, Bonheur attended the market regularly, disguised as a man to avoid unwanted attention. Her finished work was a two-hundred-inch-long scene of emotional intensity and strong character, expressed by both men and horses. Bonheur compared The Horse Fair to the famous Parthenon Frieze, the Ancient Greek relief of equestrian warriors, that is now on display in the British Museum, to the great disdain of the Greek side.

The painting became an immediate sensation. Queen Victoria herself requested a private viewing of it during the artist’s visit to England. Commissions flooded the artist, soon making her the most famous and wealthiest painter of her time—not just the most famous woman painter. Soon, she painted four smaller replicas and several watercolor copies of the work at the request of her clients.

Bonheur’s younger brother, also an artist, made a bronze relief based on the painting to be placed on Bonheur’s monument. Unfortunately, it was destroyed during World War II. All four of the Bonheur siblings became painters and sculptors, focusing primarily on animals. Some regard this as the influence of their father, a painter and educator, and others as an example of the hereditary genius—the genetically predisposed talent.

Bonheur’s success brought her not only a string of commissions and a large circle of patrons, but social obligations as well. Visitors filled her studio, and invitations to social occasions and exhibitions became overwhelming. Apart from growing connections and securing a steady income, Bonheur also became preoccupied with the new form of responsibility. The public was favorable but demanding, eagerly waiting for new paintings, new shows, and new achievements. In order to maintain her creativity in a healthy and productive way, the artist decided to act. In the late 1850s, Bonheur retired from social life and settled in a newly purchased chateau in Fontainebleau. She still painted on commission but maintained most communication through her agent, London art dealer Ernest Gambart.

Despite being born and living in France, Bonheur’s work received much more critical acclaim in Great Britain, sometimes attracting bitter criticism from the French. She was not too eager to accept belated praise, however. On several instances, after the officials offered her money for the previously rejected commissions, she refused, preferring to find another customer. For that reason, The Horse Fair, initially underestimated by the French authorities, ended up at the Metropolitan Museum rather than a Parisian institution.

3. The Gender-Based Criticism of the Artist’s Time: Weaning the Calves, 1879

Many art critics noticed the supposed masculinity of Rosa Bonheur’s work. In the nineteenth century, women artists were believed to possess specific qualities and inherent aesthetic perceptions that made their works immediately distinguishable from those of their male colleagues. Bonheur’s work, however, had no such distinction, with the bold stroke of brush, strong understanding of composition, and theoretical basis. And still, Bonheur’s paintings of animals often mix deep psychologism with tenderness and gentle admiration, like in her images of calves.

The notorious art critic John Ruskin has seen Bonheur’s work but remained staunchly convinced that no woman could paint. Ruskin had a personal animosity towards French art in any shape or form and insisted that France did not have a distinctive painting tradition at all, unlike Britain. For his nationalistic commentary, he was mocked by artists of both countries, but nonetheless, Ruskin remained influential for decades, partially due to his endorsement of the Pre-Raphaelites. Still, Rosa Bonheur was not too charmed by him, stating Ruskin had the eye of a bird for art—and not in the sense of its sharpness, but as if seeing it through a tiny pin-sized hole.

4. Rosa Bonheur’s Favorite Animals: Two Horses, 1889

Horses were perhaps the favorite animals, frequently painted by Bonheur. She was a skilled horserider, and always rode astride rather than side saddle, in a manner that was considered exclusively male and indecent for women. While working on The Horse Fair, Bonheur studied the behaviors and characters of horses well enough to develop a deep connection to them. In her diary, she left a note: “The horse is, like man, the most beautiful and most miserable of creatures, only, in the case of man, it is vice or property that makes him ugly. He is responsible for his own decadence, while the horse is only a slave.”

Perhaps, our present-day dismissal of Rosa Bonheur’s art rests on the fact that her works were rather conservative and conventional, representing a commonly shared good taste. Their great quality is diminished by the lack of a hint of a scandal, provocation, or challenge. She was not interested in defying artistic conventions, instead choosing to celebrate nature in its beauty with great attention to the tiniest of details. She was a Realist painter, but not the Courbet-type provocative Realist with raw imagery. Her realism is soft and pleasant, evoking tenderness and childhood memories.

Even her unconventional lifestyle was never performative. She was known to prefer men’s attire to dresses and even received a special municipal permit for cross-dressing, which was then illegal in Paris. Still, she highlighted that it was a choice of convenience rather than a political statement since working in slaughterhouses and stables in dresses was rather uncomfortable. Even her personal life, although raising rumors, was quiet and closed off from the rest of the world. Bonheur spent almost half a century living with a fellow painter Nathalie Micas, stating that they would gladly marry and raise children if one of them was a man.

5. Finishing Other Artist’s Work: Rosa Bonheur With a Bull

Although there are no known self-portraits painted by Bonheur, she was depicted by other artists. Most of her portraits were painted by her partner and biographer, Anna Klumpke. Klumpke spent four years with Bonheur after the death of the artist’s previous partner, Nathalie Micas. After Bonheur passed away, Klumpke was announced as the sole benefactor in the painter’s will, with all archives, paintings, and property passing to her. Klumpke made sure to protect Bonheur’s heritage and even published a memoir on their life together.

One particular portrait, however, stands out from the collection of Bonheur’s faces. Painted in 1857 by the French society painter Edouard Dubufe, the artist was shown with her arm gently placed on the neck of a bull and a paintbrush in her hand. The bull’s gentle ears and textured nose seem almost intruding in the rest of the picture as if it was never intended to be there. Well, it was, but the feeling that something is off can be easily explained. Dubufe, who specialized in official and pompous portraits of his commissioners in lavish dresses and expensive jewelry, painted only Bonheur’s figure. The bull was a later addition made by Rosa Bonheur herself, as a marker of her own love for animals and artistic specialization.

Throughout history, political artworks have served as some of the most piercing commentaries on power and ideology. Unlike pieces that merely gesture toward social themes, these works confront political realities head-on, challenging governments, exposing propaganda, and criticizing the decisions that shape national and global events. From the charged murals of the early 20th century to the provocative interventions of contemporary artists, these creations have not only documented political unrest but often sparked it. Here are ten defining political artworks that reshaped the cultural understanding of what art can do.

1. Kathe Kollwitz’s Political Artwork — The Survivors (1923)

One of the most powerful political artworks condemning World War I is Kathe Kollwitz’s The Survivors. It is a dark woodcut depicting women and children grieving, all pressed together against a dark background. Their hollow eyes and distressed facial expressions suggest their collective anguish.

The Survivors confronted a different aspect of World War I, different from the “noble sacrifice” narrative. Rather than honoring military glory or patriotic duty, the artwork exposed what that narrative left out: the civilians who endured loss, poverty, and instability as a direct result of government action. Kollwitz, who lost her own son in the war, turned personal grief into a public statement about the political structures that enable conflict.

Kollwitz’s piece was shocking because it confronted the official narratives that sought to restore national pride. Germany was defeated and deeply polarized. So, when a lithograph made the political classes see ordinary people’s suffering, it was considered unpatriotic and destabilizing. The fact that the piece was raw and made by a well-respected female artist of the time made it even more influential and controversial.

2. Diego Rivera — Man at the Crossroads (1933)

Diego Rivera created this monumental mural for Rockefeller Center in New York in 1933, celebrating human progress. However, his take on the subject was a politically charged version of the modern world. He placed science, industry, and society at a crossroads between capitalism and socialism. At the center of the mural, there is a working man who controls the machinery. He is surrounded by technological achievement, social struggle, and political figures, with the most apparent being Vladimir Lenin. Depicting Lenin, Rivera included strong references to Marxist ideology and showed his support for the socialist ideas.

The political stance of this mural piece was quite clear. It confronted issues of class, labor, and financial power. Rivera was not afraid to step up as an artist and challenge the capitalist patron who commissioned the work. He placed ordinary workers and revolutionary figures alongside symbols of elitism and power, commenting on their juxtaposition and on how social inequality is formed.

It was one of the most provocative political artworks of the time, as Nelson Rockefeller, the commissioner, ordered its destruction just a few months after its reveal. He said that the depiction of Lenin was unacceptable. The destruction was an international scandal, as it became a breaking point between artistic freedom and governmental and corporate authority. The artist recreated it later in Mexico City, under the title Man, Controller of the Universe.

3. Martha Rosler — House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967–72)

House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home is a striking photomontage series by Martha Rosler. The photos are a blend of modern house interiors from glossy magazines and traumatic stills from the Vietnam War. The artist’s juxtaposition is nerve-racking; beautiful interiors with fancy furniture perfectly arranged house scenes of bombings, soldiers, and civilian casualties. This way, she forced the viewers to face the contrast between American comfort, the commodities of their house, and the brutal realities of the US military intervention in Vietnam. Her choice of media was powerful, as she made the war literally intrude on the safe space of home.

The series is an ideal example of political artworks. It directly critiqued the American government. Additionally, it called upon society’s lack of concern and questioned the way domestic consumption could conceal political atrocities. By bringing images of war into the familiar context of home, Rosler exposed the implications of citizens and institutions in supporting political agendas.

The House Beautiful series really shocked the audience when it first appeared due to its powerful imagery and confrontational approach. It achieved its goal because it did not stay in the gallery spaces but circulated in publications such as Life Magazine and various exhibitions, reaching a wide range of the public and making the political critique unavoidable. Thus, Rosler turned photography into an artistic tool of political accountability.

4. Anita Steckel — Giant Woman (1970–72)

The Giant Woman series is a collection of photomontages by Anita Steckel. It consists of bold works that blend erotic imagery with symbols of political power. Steckel placed giant female figures, often partially or completely nude, in the middle of New York skyscrapers, military equipment, or even between US presidents, such as Richard Nixon, doubting the domination of male authority in public life.

This series was both politically and socially charged. Steckel targeted the U.S. government, its leaders, and their moral hypocrisy. Moreover, she commented on the public morals and the realities of patriarchy of the time. Her choice to place icons of national authority into playful and sometimes even defenseless situations revealed the artist’s opinion about the fragility of political power. At a time when political scandals and anti-war movements were reshaping the national conversation, Steckel’s collages added a feminist critique that questioned who occupied public space and commanded authority.

The Giant Woman caused shock and criticism not only for its nudity, but also for its provocative mockery of presidents. A few art spaces tried to censor the photomontages and remove them. However, that gave Steckel the push to create the Fight Censorship Group in an effort to defend artistic freedom. This series, and Steckel’s work in general, remain influential political artworks because they reveal how threatening it is to combine sexuality, feminism, and political critique in such a direct way.

5. Keith Haring — Crack Is Wack (1986)

Keith Haring’s Crack is Wack (1986) is one of the most iconic public murals of the 1980s. The artist painted it on a handball court in East Harlem at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic. Using his characteristic bold lines and vibrating figures, he created a bright, cartoonish composition that contrasted sharply with the deadly seriousness of the crisis. The mural featured frantic human forms, skulls, and symbols of chaos, visually conveying the destructive spread of crack across New York City.

Although it is often seen as a social comment, Crack is Wack is mostly a political critique. At the time, the U.S. government’s “War on Drugs” targeted unjustly and criminalized communities of color. Harring’s mural was a direct critique of these offenses, addressing the human cost of the crisis. He deliberately placed the artwork in a public space, where art institutions had no control. He also painted it illegally, further highlighting the mural’s message.

Crack is Wack attacked government drug policies, shocking everyone with its boldness. This resulted in Haring’s arrest and the authorities’ attempts to remove the mural. However, these events only made the piece more relevant. Today, Crack is Wack remains one of the most recognizable and everlasting political artworks.

6. Barbara Kruger — Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) (1989)

Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) by Barbara Kruger is another feminist political artwork. It directly confronts the politics around women’s bodies and reproductive rights. The piece is a photographic silkscreen, featuring a black-and-white female face, divided in the middle, overlaid with red and white text. The text itself is a statement on individual autonomy and political struggle.

This work targets state authority and public policy rather than purely social or cultural norms. Kruger created it for a pro-choice demonstration in Washington, D.C., during a period of intense political debate over abortion rights in the United States. By using graphic design techniques reminiscent of advertising—large-scale text, high-contrast imagery, and a confrontational layout—Kruger turned the language and visual style of mass media against itself, exposing how political messages are constructed and disseminated.

Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) shocked due to its directness and public visibility. Kruger was another artist who used photography for political commentary, combining aesthetic values with urgent activism. She encouraged the supporters of reproductive rights and, at the same time, provoked strong reactions from the opposers. Its message remains relevant today, as the discourse about reproductive rights is still ongoing.

7. Dmitri Vrubel — My God, Help Me Survive This Deadly Love (1990)

The iconic mural was painted on the Berlin Wall by Dmitri Vrubel, a Russian painter. It depicts Leonid Brezhnev, a Soviet leader, and Erich Honecker, an East German leader, kissing. The comic style of the mural magnified the intimacy of the kiss and placed it within the broader context of Cold War politics.

The mural is an emblematic example of political artworks because it directly confronted the absurdities of totalitarian regimes. The title was actually taken from another graffiti on the Wall. It amplified the political message of the mural by making the kiss a “deadly love” that oppressed the ordinary citizens. In this way, the work became a public indictment of government collusion, ideological control, and the state’s restrictions on personal freedom.

The mural stunned people with its satire. Vrubel painted it on the Berlin Wall, one of the Cold War’s most iconic monuments. The combination of the subject and the mural’s placement was enough to spark political discourse and even disturb. Over the years, it became one of the most recognizable political artworks of the late 20th century. It demonstrated how art can memorialize political turmoil in a single, unforgettable image.

8. Ai Weiwei — Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995)

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn is a provocative photographic triptych documenting the artist intentionally dropping a 2,000-year-old Chinese urn and letting it shatter into pieces. The sequence transforms a moment of destruction into a carefully staged act of artistic expression. On the surface, the work appears shocking for its apparent desecration of cultural heritage. However, it is mostly a deliberate critique of the state’s control over culture.

When Weiwei destroyed a symbol of imperial history, he basically called out the government for deciding how history was presented. It was also a comment on China’s political and social transformation, reflecting the pressures around tradition, nationalism, and overall modernization. Therefore, this photographed performance became a reflection on political power and censorship. Naturally, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn caused many reactions. Many people thought it was a blasphemous act. However, the artist’s political intentions were much stronger, criticizing the relationship between history and culture, art and politics.

9. Banksy — Girl Frisking Soldier (2007)

Girl Frisking Soldier is a powerful stencil mural by Banksy, painted in the West Bank, Palestine. It shows a little girl frisking a fully armed Israeli soldier, reversing the traditional roles of control and vulnerability. The painting’s message is immediately recognizable and impactful. Banksy’s creation is quintessentially political and relevant today. It directly critiques military power and the politics of occupation. By having a child perform an act of control, the artist exposed the fragile nature of power structures: who holds the authority, how, and with what outcome on ordinary people. The mural’s simplicity only underscores its message.

Banksy’s murals are always shocking for their audacity. Moreover, his choice of public placement makes it more than art; it becomes activism. The artist blends humor and irony with sharp critique, but always in a visually understandable way. So, the appeal and what he wants to convey are crystal clear. Girl Frisking Soldier is another impressive example of public art’s power in engaging directly with political and social issues.

10. Georgia Lale Political Artwork — Neighbourhood Guilt (2021)

Georgia Lale’s Neighbourhood Guilt, widely known as the “pink flag,” is one of the most politically charged artworks to emerge from Greece in recent years. The piece reinterpreted the Greek national flag in soft pink and white, but its material gave it a devastating weight: it is sewn from bedsheets donated by Greek women who have experienced domestic violence. Lale conceived the artwork after the 2021 femicide of Caroline Crouch, inviting women to send her their sheets as an intimate act of testimony. As the artist has explained, most femicides occur in the home, and it is bedsheets that “soak up their blood.”

When the flag was first displayed at the Greek Consulate in New York in December 2023, it sparked a political uproar. Specifically, the conservative and far-right politicians denounced it as disrespectful to the national symbol. The outcry was so big that the Greek Foreign Minister ordered its removal. Ever since, Neighborhood Guilt has become a symbol of resistance and resilience. In 2024 and 2025, it was projected onto the Athens City Hall on International Women’s Day. It has also been exhibited in public displays, making it a landmark for awareness and accountability.

Vincent van Gogh focused most of his paintings on nature, taking inspiration from both the vibrant landscapes of Provence and rural scenes in the Netherlands. But sometimes he indulged in painting witty and unusual subjects that can only be recognized as belonging to the Dutch artist because of his unique style. One such painting is the Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette, painted in Antwerp in early 1886. It depicts a skeleton on a dark background with a lit cigarette held between its teeth.

Van Gogh’s Moving to Antwerp

In 1885, Van Gogh moved to Antwerp, Belgium, at age 32. He had already been engaged in making art for a few years, and the decision to move to this city had been under consideration for some time. He was excited to explore the city and particularly looked forward to visiting its museums, including the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp and Musée Moderne, which housed a rich collection of European fine art. Here, Van Gogh came across numerous works by 16th and 17th century Flemish artists such as Henri Leys, Frans Hals, and Jan van Eyck that inspired him.

The works of the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens had a notable impact on him. Describing his admiration of Rubens, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in December 1885, “Rubens is certainly making a strong impression on me. I find his drawing immensely good, by which I mean the drawing of heads and hands in themselves. . . I go to the museum quite often and then look at little else but a few heads and hands by him and Jordaens.”

With marvelous forms, colors, and mastered lines passing before his eyes in this abundant cultural environment, Antwerp breathed new life into Van Gogh’s artistic passion. Driven by this passion, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten) in January 1886. Here, he hoped to gain knowledge at an institutional level that would benefit his development as an artist: “I can probably learn something there that could be useful to me, be it for painting, be it for drawing. And in any event it’s an attempt to get to know people.”

Soon enough, Van Gogh started taking a drawing course under the tutelage of Frans Vinck and, eventually, Eugène Siberdt in the evenings. He also took a painting course during the daytime.

Despite this immersion into art, the artist’s experiences during his stay in Antwerp were not solely positive. He made several unsuccessful attempts to sell his works, lived in poverty most of the time, and came to view the institutional modes of art teaching with dissatisfaction after joining the academy.

In the 19th century, art academies in Europe primarily focused on developing specific skills, such as drawing from live models, sculptures, and objects with accuracy. Although Van Gogh was inspired by the Old Masters, he sought to move in a different direction beyond the realist tradition upheld by the academy.

He vehemently opposed the mechanical manner of teaching and making art that he experienced there, writing: “how flat, how dead and how bloody boring the results of that system are.” His work was often judged harshly by his instructors for not following the expected manner of naturalistic depiction, which led him to develop difficult relationships with them: “All the same, even though I don’t say anything, I irritate them—and they me.”

This experience led Van Gogh to realize that art academies worked under rigid conventional systems to produce artists who drew and painted ‘correctly,’ leaving no space for originality and creative individuality.

Painting “Head of a Skeleton With a Burning Cigarette”

While attending the art academy in Antwerp, Van Gogh hoped to perfect his skills as a figure painter and often painted live models. One of the academy’s practices involved drawing skeletons to grasp the proportions and details of human anatomy. Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette was painted with this practice in mind. This painting, which was titled Skull with cigarette by Van Gogh’s sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, was actually based on a full skeleton. It depicts the skull and the thoracic bones with a lit cigarette between the teeth emitting smoke. Van Gogh painted this work in one session and captured anatomical proportions impressively.

The composition is earth-colored, in accordance with the instruction of the art academy. Van Gogh used colors from the Dutch palette that dominated his early canvases painted in the Netherlands, such as ochres and browns. The skeleton is painted with subtle shades of yellow and brown, with hints of blue and red to capture the color of bones. Placing the composition in front of a dark background highlights the anatomical details of the skeleton head, as well as Van Gogh’s handling of color while working with a darker, limited palette. Overall, the composition is well executed, demonstrating a solid grasp of human anatomy and the ability to depict it on canvas with precision.

What Does It Mean?

The practice of the art academy was limited to making drawings of skeletons for anatomical study, which suggests that Van Gogh painted this independently outside classes. However, the painting must be based on studies of a skeleton he would have made during his drawing lessons. Van Gogh depicts the skeleton as smoking a cigarette, adding a layer of satire and humor to an otherwise fine composition. The act of smoking adds both a sense of life to the skeleton, as well as plays on the concept of death.

Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette has been subject of much debate among scholars with some claiming this to be a rejection of his Christian views by treating the subject of death with humor, while others believe it to be an inconsequential joke originating from his boredom and lack of creative stimulation during his drawing lessons at the art academy.

Nevertheless, this painting was inspired by Van Gogh’s opposition to the academy’s principles, which promoted realist art and suppressed individual expression. It shows his artistic prowess alongside his ability to express his creativity freely, while also subverting the expectations of the academy, something that would not have hesitated Van Gogh given his troubled relationships with the instructors. In a letter to Theo from February 1886, he recalled an instance of his instructor Eugène Siberdt attempting to start an argument with him during one of the drawing lessons: “That Siberdt, the teacher of the antique, who spoke to me at first as I told you, definitely tried to pick a quarrel with me today, perhaps with a view to getting rid of me.” Experiencing an atmosphere he considered stifling, Van Gogh did not shy away from making a humorous painting that would displease members of the academy.

Disillusioned with the institutional practices he witnessed in Antwerp, Van Gogh left the city on February 28, 1886 to move to Paris. His intolerance was reciprocated as the academy had demoted Van Gogh to a lower grade, but he had already left the city by then.

In Paris, Van Gogh would go on to discover avant-garde modes of handling color and forms that later completely transformed his art. For the most part, Paris allowed him to work freely, without institutional constraints, and to experiment with his creativity. Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette can be seen as a precursor to this experimentation. The painting is a satirical piece that shows his dissent for the rigid rules of art upheld by the academy. Its ownership remained within the Van Gogh family until the establishment of the Van Gogh Museum, where it is housed today.

Other Works With Skulls

In addition to the Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette, Van Gogh made three other works with a similar subject. One of these was painted in Paris in May 1887. This is a much brighter work than the Antwerp version, and it shows an evolution in Van Gogh’s style. The Paris painting features a yellow background and employs a more luminous palette. It also shows Van Gogh’s attempts at stippling, that is, painting with small dashes of color placed next to each other. He was inspired to use this technique by the French artist Georges Seurat, who pioneered the Pointillist style of painting in the 19th century.

Skull, however, is clearly an attempt at a still-life painting without any satirical connotations. Van Gogh was experimenting with color theory during this period, as evidenced by his use of shades of red and green on the skull and blue outlines, rather than a muted palette as in the Antwerp version.

Moreover, the use of stippling distinguishes it from Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette which carries traces of the traditional Dutch brushwork through its use of broad strokes of paint.

Another painting made around the same time in Paris with the same title depicts a skull viewed from the front. It is not as well-painted as the other two and it was made as a study to experiment with color. This version has more defined outlines and uses reds, yellows, and greens. Somewhere between 1886 and 1887, Van Gogh also made a pencil drawing on cardboard depicting a skeleton in front of a window with a black cat perched on the windowsill. The exact date of the drawing is not known, but it was most likely painted in Antwerp or Paris.

All of his works depicting skeletons fall within the same period, perhaps due to greater exposure to this subject in the art academy at Antwerp and in the studio of Fernand Cormon in Paris. In addition to these works, Van Gogh made two small sketches of skeletons in his sketchbook: one depicts a pelvis, while the other is less detailed and more imaginative, showing two skeletons riding horses side by side, with windmills surrounding them.

Van Gogh’s Sense of Humor

Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette is not the only work where Van Gogh displays his playful side. After moving to Paris, he joined the studio of Fernand Cormon to continue his practice of figure painting. Pupils frequently worked with plaster casts as models when drawing. Van Gogh made several drawings of such objects during his time in Cormon’s studio.

One of the works, titled Venus in a top hat, made with black chalk, depicts a plaster cast of Venus with the head comically covered in a top hat. This was likely also intended as a joke, treating the plaster cast of Venus as a hat stand. The drawing is otherwise well-made, with dark shading in the background that centers the white plaster cast. Van Gogh also drew framing lines around the sketch, suggesting his fondness for it.

Although Van Gogh is often regarded as a troubled figure today, he still had a sense of humor and made lighthearted jokes through his art. At the same time, he was opinionated and held a strong sense of individuality and desire for artistic freedom. Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette is an excellent example of this creative individuality.

He remained open to experimentation with both style and subject matter throughout his life, learning various techniques from his peers in Paris and developing an exceptional oeuvre that demonstrates his evolution as an artist beyond the constraints of art academies.

Every year, sites like the Colosseum, Pompeii, the pyramids of Giza, or Machu Picchu receive millions of visitors, intrigued by the aura of mystery and past glory surrounding ancient ruins. Indeed, the monuments and artifacts left behind by ancient civilizations not only allow scholars to study the past, but also offer us a glimpse into the people who created and used them. Unfortunately, only a small number of physical remnants of the ancient past have survived. Here are ten ancient cultural and architectural landmarks that we have lost forever.

1. Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

• Date lost: c. 260s AD
• Overview: A grand temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis, a wonder of the ancient world.

In one of his poems, where he compiled one of the earliest known lists of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Greek poet Antipater of Sidon commented: “when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, ‘Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand.’” Greek geographer Pausanias was equally impressed by the place of worship, describing it as “surpassing all buildings among men.”

One of the largest ancient Greek temples, over 350 by 180 feet (about 110 by 55 meters), the temple of Artemis (Roman Diana), the goddess of hunting, was built at Ephesus (in present-day Turkey) by Croesus, the famously wealthy king of Lydia in about 550 BC. Ephesus, one of the most influential cities in Ionian Asia Minor, was said to have been founded by an Amazonian queen and had long been associated with religious worship.

In 356, the temple of Artemis was burned by Herostatus, a man who hoped his arson would secure his fame. According to Plutarch, on the night of the fire, the goddess was absent from the temple as she was assisting in the birth of Alexander the Great. Once rebuilt, the temple soon became a wonder of the ancient world.

However, in the 260s AD, the temple of Artemis was ravaged by the Goths and later destroyed with the spread of Christianity. Today, a single column and the foundations are all that remain of the wondrous building.

2. House of Wisdom

• Date lost: 1258 AD
• Overview: A royal library built in Baghdad by the Abbasids during the Islamic Golden Age.

The House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikmah) was a royal library and cultural center founded by the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. After overthrowing the Umayyad dynasty in 750 AD, al-Mansur transferred the capital of the Islamic world from Damascus to Baghdad, a location closer to his Persian support base.

Built at the crossroads of the Silk Road, the trading route connecting Europe to China, the new capital, distinctive for its circular form, soon became a leading center not only for trade, but also for science and culture. Indeed, the Abbasid caliphs’ extensive patronage of the arts and sciences laid the groundwork for the development of the Islamic Golden Age.

In this intellectually stimulating period, the House of Wisdom became a leading center of scholarship, where copyists, bookbinders, and librarians amassed an eclectic collection on a wide variety of topics, such as Zoroastrian religion, alchemy, astronomy, medicine, geography, and chemistry. Among those working at the House of Wisdom was mathematician and astronomer Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, usually credited as the “father of algebra.”

Scholars affiliated with the House of Wisdom also translated major works of Persian and Greek literature into Arabic, thus preserving knowledge that would have been otherwise lost. In the 14th century, these translations would play a key role in the “rediscovery” of antiquity that stood at the heart of the European Renaissance.

Unfortunately, the priceless collection held at the House of Wisdom was destroyed in 1258, when the Mongol forces sacked Baghdad.

3. Hanging Gardens of Babylon

• Date lost: 1st century AD
• Overview: Terraced gardens allegedly built by Nebuchadnezzar II; one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

According to legend, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were built by King Nebuchadnezzar II as a gift for his wife Amtis of Media, who missed the green landscapes of her homeland. Besides their impressive size, the self-watering system of irrigation also impressed ancient visitors, prompting them to include the lush terraces in the list of the wonders of the world.

In ancient Mesopotamia, extensive gardens were seen as symbols of the empire’s power, impressing visitors with their exotic vegetation flourishing thanks to advanced irrigation systems. The image of a garden as a serene and enclosed place, separated from the world, has long fascinated humankind and is closely associated with the concept of paradise. The link is emphasized by the most widely accepted etymology of the word “paradise,” traced back to the Old Iranian term pairi-daeza, meaning “walled enclosure.”

According to Strabo, the gardens were “vaulted terraces, raised one above another, and resting upon cube-shaped pillars. These are hollow and filled with earth to allow trees of the largest size to be planted.” The lush vegetation was watered through a series of engines pumping water from the nearby Euphrates River.

As no certain archaeological traces of the Hanging Gardens have been found, scholars disagree on what they may have looked like, with some even doubting if they ever existed. According to some theories, the Gardens were created on the rooftops of the royal palace in Babylon. Others believe they were built within the palace’s walls.

More recently, Oxford Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley has suggested the Hanging Gardens were actually built by King Sennacherib at Nineveh, a city the Assyrians, who conquered Babylon in the 7th century, called the New Babylon. Regardless of their location, the gardens are now lost forever, destroyed by an earthquake in the 1st century AD.

4. Lighthouse of Alexandria

• Date lost: c. 14th century AD
• Overview: A 350-feet-tall lighthouse on Pharos Island near Alexandria; one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The Lighthouse (or Pharos) of Alexandria, one of the wonders of the ancient world, was built by Sostratus of Cnidus. The construction process began during the reign of Ptolemy I Soter and ended in about 280 BC, when his son, Ptolemy II, sat on the throne.

Erected on the island of Pharos in the harbor of Alexandria in Egypt, the impressive construction—it is said the lighthouse was more than 350 feet/110 meters high—aided ships navigating near the coastline, guiding and warning them of hazards. The tower was likely built in three stages and toppled with a statue, possibly of Alexander the Great or Ptolemy I.

The lighthouse was still active in the 12th century. By the 14th century, however, it had already been destroyed.

5. Great Library of Alexandria

• Date lost: disputed
• Overview: A royal library and leading center of scholarship built by the Ptolemaic dynasty in Alexandria.

Like the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the Great Library of Alexandria was also a leading ancient cultural center, the most famous of Classical antiquity.

The construction of the library began in about 295 BC, when Ptolemy I Soter tasked Demetrius of Phaleron, an Athenian member of Aristotle’s Peripatetic school, with overseeing the ambitious project. In the following years, the library amassed an impressive collection of books and manuscripts, and, with the nearby Museum, it became an illustrious center of research and literary and scientific scholarship.

To this day, the events that led to the Library of Alexandria’s destruction remain a matter of debate. According to Plutarch, the library was destroyed in 48 BC, when Julius Caesar set fire to the Ptolemaic fleet during the civil war between Cleopatra and his brother. “Many places were set on fire, with the result that the docks and the storehouses of grain among other buildings were burned, and also the library, whose volumes, it is said, were of the greatest number and excellence,” commented Plutarch.

According to some scholars, the Serapeum, a branch of the library located in the temple of Serapis, survived the fire. It likely remained active until 391 AD, when the bishop of Alexandria, Theophilus, demolished it following Theodosius’ decree banning pagan worship.

6. Mausoleum at Halicarnassus

• Date lost: 15th century AD
• Overview: A grand tomb built for King Mausolus of Caria and his wife, Artemis; one of the Wonders of the Ancient World.

The tomb of Mausolus, king of Caria, was built in Halicarnassus, the main city of the kingdom and the birthplace of Herodotus (the “Father of History”) between about 353 and 351 BC. Upon inheriting the throne after his father died in 377 BC, Mausolus launched a project of urban aggrandizement as part of his efforts to expand Halicarnassus’ influence in the Mediterranean.

After his death, his wife (and sister) Artemisia II, a powerful leader in her own right, tasked the leading Greek architects and artists with the construction of a monumental tomb to perpetuate Mausolus’ legacy, a project likely initiated by Mausolus himself. Architects Satyros and Pythius of Priene designed the tomb, while sculptors Leochares, Bryaxis, Scopas, and Timotheus created reliefs to adorn the massive structure’s sides.

Artemisia died shortly after the beginning of the Mausoleum’s construction, but her successors completed the work. The final result was a colossal tomb that became one of the wonders of the ancient world. According to Pliny the Elder, it was surrounded by 36 columns and surmounted by a marble chariot pulled by four horses.

The tomb stood on a hill overlooking Halicarnassus until the 15th century, when a series of earthquakes destroyed it. Today, countless stately tombs around the world, known as mausoleums from the Mausoleum in Halicarnassus, testify to the monument’s legacy and influence.

7. Colossus of Rhodes

• Date lost: toppled in 255/56 BC; destroyed in 654 AD
• Overview: A massive statue of the sun god Helius; one the the Wonders of the Ancient World.

Toward the end of the 3rd century BC, all those entering the harbor of Rhodes, the major city of the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea, would have hardly missed the colossus statue of the sun god Helius, erected beside Mandrákion harbor in 282 BC.

Created by Chares of Lindos, the statue, known as the Colossus of Rhodes, was said to have taken 12 years to build. Made of bronze and reinforced with iron, the Colossus commemorated the end of Demetrius Poliorcetes’ siege of the city. Launched during the political instability of the Hellenistic world after the death of Alexander the Great, the siege aimed to persuade the Rhodians to withdraw their support for Ptolemy, the ruler of Egypt.

After the unsuccessful siege, the Rhodians used the equipment abandoned by Demetrius’ forces to erect a monument commemorating their resistance. The result was a colossal statue, 105 feet (32 meters) high, that became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Impressed by the Colossus’ size and splendor, Roman Emperor Nero built an enormous statue of himself next to the artificial lake at the center of his domus aurea (Golden House) in Rome.

The Colossus of Rhodes welcomed ships entering the city’s harbor until about 255/256 BC, when an earthquake toppled it. The fallen statue remained lying in the spot where it fell for about 900 years. “Even as it lies, it excites our wonder and admiration,” commented Pliny the Elder in his The Natural History. Then, in 654 AD, the Arab forces raiding Rhodes melted it down and sold the bronze for scraps.

8. Ancient Ruins of Palmyra

• Date lost: 2015
• Overview: An archaeological site in Syria included in the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1980.

Built on an oasis located halfway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Euphrates River, the ancient city of Palmyra (south-central Syria) rose to prominence in the 3rd century BC, when it became one of the main trading routes connecting the Roman world with the East.

Originally known as Tadmur, Tadmor, or Tudmun, the city was renamed Palmyra, meaning “city of palm trees,” by the Romans in the 1st century BC. While under Roman control, Palmyra remained a prosperous city, and, in about 129, Hadrian made it a civitas libera (free city). It was later exempted from paying taxes to the Roman Empire by Caracalla.

In the 3rd century, Zenobia, the second wife of the governor of Syria, Septimius Odaenathus (probably assassinated on her order), became queen of Palmyra, launching a successful campaign against the Romans in Anatolia. In 273, however, Emperor Aurelian, who regained control of Anatolia the year before, raided Palmyra. In 643, the city was then conquered by the Muslim general Khalid ibn al-Walid.

In 1980, the ruins of ancient Palmyra became a UNESCO World Heritage site, with thousands of visitors admiring the ancient remains every year. In May 2012, however, when ISIS took control of Palmyra during the Syrian civil war, its forces destroyed several of the site’s monuments, including the Temple of Bel, the Arch of Triumph, built by Septimius Severus, and the Temple of Baal Shamin.

9. Statue of Zeus at Olympia

• Date lost: 5th century AD
• Overview: A colossal statue of Zeus created by Phidias for the temple of Zeus at Olympia; one of the Wonders of the Ancient World.

Another wonder of the ancient world, the statue of Zeus at Olympia was created by the Greek sculptor Phidias, the artist who also sculpted the statue of Athena in the Parthenon at Athens.

Made of gold and ivory, the statue, located inside the temple of Zeus at Olympia, depicted Zeus, the ruler of the Greek gods, sitting on a throne made of cedarwood and adorned with precious stones, gold, ivory, and ebony. In his outstretched right hand, the colossal statue (almost 4o feet/12 meters high) held a statue of Nike, the goddess of victory. In his left hand, Zeus had a scepter.

Said to have captured the divine nature of Zeus, the statue likely survived the destruction of the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Probably moved to Constantinople, it was destroyed in a fire that ravaged the city in the 5th century.

While the statue of Zeus is now lost forever, reconstructions based on ancient Greek and Roman coins and paintings give us an idea of what it may have looked like to ancient visitors passing through Olympia.

10. Menorah From the Second Temple

• Date lost: after 71 AD
• Overview: A golden multibranched candelabra located in the Jewish temple of Jerusalem; looted by the Romans in 70 AD.

One of the bas-reliefs carved into the Arch of Titus on the via Sacra shows a seven-branched candelabra carried on litters: the menorah. The religious object was part of the spoils of war paraded through Rome during Titus’ triumph following the 70 AD sack of Jerusalem.

Until the outbreak of the First Jewish-Roman War, sparked by the sack of the Second Temple (built by Herod the Great) and the execution of thousands of Jews, the menorah was displayed inside the temple in Jerusalem. First mentioned in the book of Exodus, the design of the multibranched candelabra had been revealed to Moses directly by God on Mount Sinai.

When the Jews rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem, after finally returning from their exile in Babylon, they also forged a golden menorah and placed it inside the building. In 169 BC, however, it was taken by King Antiochus IV Epiphanes when he sacked the temple. When Judas Maccabee successfully defended his country from the Syrian kingdom’s invasion, he commissioned the creation of a new menorah, the one seized by the Roman forces in 70 AD.

After it arrived in Rome the following year, the menorah seemingly disappeared, never to be seen again. Flavius Josephus reported that most of the treasures looted by Titus were later placed inside the Temple of Peace by Emperor Vespasian. However, whether the menorah was also brought there remains unclear. Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea later wrote that the treasures were returned to Jerusalem after the sacks of Rome in 410 and 455. However, he did not explicitly mention the menorah.

Its disappearance has led to the spread of numerous legends about the menorah’s fate. One urban myth even claims that it was hidden inside the Vatican. In 2012, a scan using UV-VIS Absorption Spectrometry made by a team of scholars associated with the Arch of Titus Project revealed the menorah on the bas-relief was once painted with a yellow ochre pigment, suggesting it was indeed the golden menorah from the Second Temple.

Starry Night Over the Rhône was painted in Arles in September 1888. It portrays a view of the river Rhône at night under a deep blue starry sky, with two figures in the foreground and the gleaming city lights on the horizon. Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhône was painted at night under the light of a gas lamp, which is why it appears to envelop the viewer into the cobalt sky and capture the essence of the Provençal night.

Van Gogh’s “Starry Night Over the Rhone”: The Night Effect

Van Gogh moved to Arles in the south of France in 1888. He wanted to paint in the light of the countryside and leave the hustle and bustle of city life in Paris behind. In Arles, he was enraptured by the extraordinary light of the sun and painted many works dedicated to capturing the essence of Provençal sunlight. But his fascination was not limited to the light of the sun. Van Gogh had expressed his wish to paint night scenes in multiple letters that he wrote from Arles. He even considered the night to be a better subject to paint because of the variety of colors it offered.

In a letter from September 1888 to his sister Willemein, he wrote, “I definitely want to paint a starry sky now. It often seems to me that the night is even more richly colored than the day, colored in the most intense violets, blues and greens.” He wrote something similar to Theo around the same time: “It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day.”

Starry Night Over the Rhône seems to be a materialization of Van Gogh’s creative desires. This painting, along with Irises that he painted in 1889 during his stay in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, was exhibited in the 1889 exhibition of Société des Artistes Indépendants, which was formed as a response to the Salon d’Automne to give a platform to independent artists who deviated from the traditional norms of painting. Van Gogh left the decision to display his works up to Theo and suggested the inclusion of the scene on the Rhône in the exhibition as “that might give others the idea of doing night effects better than I do.” When the exhibition opened, Theo informed Van Gogh that, due to the size of the room, the night scene was “badly placed,” but gave a positive response to the field of irises, describing it as a “fine study, full of air and life.”

Capturing the Provençal Night

Despite seeming like a dream-like scene, Starry Night Over the Rhône depicts a real place in Arles. The Rhône is a major river that emerges from the Alps and runs through Switzerland and France. In Arles, it splits into two and eventually merges into the Mediterranean Sea. Van Gogh rented four rooms in a house on Place Lamartine in Arles, two on each floor. This came to be known as his Yellow House. It is also where Paul Gauguin stayed with Van Gogh during their short cohabitation in 1888. This house, which was unfortunately destroyed in a bombing in 1944, was only a short walk away from the bank of the Rhône. The river would thus have often been visited by Van Gogh, giving him the opportunity to familiarize himself and carefully study the area and color effects before he painted Starry Night Over the Rhône.

Van Gogh first described this painting in a letter to Theo, focusing on the different colors he used to achieve the night effect: “The sky is green-blue, the water is royal blue, the areas of land are mauve. The town is blue and violet. The gaslight is yellow, and its reflections are red gold and go right down to green bronze.” Starry Night Over the Rhône also depicts the Great Bear or the Ursa Major constellation. Van Gogh painted the starlight with a paler yellow to distinguish it from the gaslight illuminating the town on the horizon, which has more of a gold hue. He also included a detailed sketch of the painting for his artist friend Eugène Boch that depicts the scene with the same brilliance through the use of lines instead of color.

The Colors of the Night

Despite being a night scene, Starry Night Over the Rhône creates a harmony of a myriad of colors that are not limited to dark blues and black. This painting represents Van Gogh’s views on creating night paintings. He clearly stated in a letter that a nocturnal scene is not as simple as “white spots on blue-black” and needs to include a wide range of colors to truly depict the shades of the night. Moreover, Van Gogh preferred to paint night scenes while being outside at night with the subject in front of him, instead of painting in a studio during the day based on previous studies made outside.

Essentially, Starry Night Over the Rhône demonstrated how Van Gogh approached night scenes not through their darkness, but through the light reflected in the dark. He explained how “a mere candle by itself gives us the richest yellows and oranges,” suggesting that the way light is accentuated in the darkness of the night offers a wonderful array of colors to be harnessed on the canvas. The night scene on the Rhône is dominated by blues and punctuated with yellows and ochre. Van Gogh used varying shades of blue, with patches of a lighter shade in the middle of the sky and deep blue around the edges of the canvas.

The reflection of the twinkling sky and the gas lights of the town are also created by manipulating the blues, while the bright yellow lights form long lines on the water. On careful observation, layers of colors embedded into the blue become noticeable, such as shades of green in the foreground and violet in the town in the background. Van Gogh also used stippling, which means painting by placing dots and dashes of different colors next to each other to achieve color harmony, in Starry Night Over the Rhône. This technique was pioneered by the French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat, who contributed to Van Gogh’s development as a colorist.

Van Gogh had experimented with Neo-Impressionist stippling in Paris between 1886-87, visible in works such as Red Cabbages and Garlic and View from Theo’s Apartment from 1887. He continued experimenting with it in Arles and implemented it in Starry Night Over the Rhône. The painting shows brushstrokes placed as dashes with thick impasto, making them distinctly visible on the canvas. This use of stippling, along with layering thick paint on the canvas, imparts the painting a specific quality that is unique to Van Gogh; it shows the illusion of movement. This is particularly visible in the brushstrokes on the water representing the reflection of lights, wherein yellow, green, and orange dashes placed next to each other give the impression of the reflections flickering with the water.

A Couple of Van Gogh’s Starry Nights

Starry Night Over the Rhône was one of multiple paintings depicting a night scene that Van Gogh painted in Arles. The others included the well-known Starry Night and Café Terrace on the Place du Forum. These paintings, while depicting a night effect with a wide range of colors and powerful lines, have certain differences in terms of their execution. You can observe the evolution of the night sky in these three paintings and how they reflect Van Gogh’s ideas.

Café Terrace on the Place du Forum or Café Terrace at Night was the first in the series of night scenes painted in Arles in 1888. Here, Van Gogh is conservative in depicting the night sky, which is limited to a small portion of the canvas at the top. Still, it is a dynamic night scene accentuated by the lights of the café and the dimly lit windows of the buildings. Describing the colors of this painting in great detail, Van Gogh wrote in a letter, “Now there’s a painting of night without black.” He included shades of green, violet, yellow, and blue to depict a luminous night scene in Arles that became a precursor to the night scene on the Rhône.

In Starry Night Over the Rhône, Van Gogh completely embraced the night. The entire canvas is enveloped by the night sky and its reflection in the water. By choosing a scene on the river, Van Gogh cleverly created a night scene where the depiction of the sky is not limited to the upper corner of the canvas and can take over the entire composition. This is a calm painting that captures the serene atmosphere of the night by the river, away from the town’s gaslight, which remains visible in the background, with a pair of lovers placed at the bottom. This painting was the precursor to the final work with the night sky as its subject, The Starry Night.

The Starry Night came into being when Van Gogh was admitted to the psychiatric institution in Saint-Rémy in 1889. While the scene on the Rhône is serene and marvelous, The Starry Night appears turbulent with the extreme swirling lines of the night sky that command the attention of the viewer. In a way, this painting has a similar dynamic and turbulent effect as potentially Van Gogh’s final work, Wheatfield with Crows, which was painted in Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890.

The Starry Night is also an interesting addition to the series of night effects because Van Gogh subverted his own views on painting nocturnal scenes on the spot at night. This painting was most likely painted indoors from memory with a few imaginative elements, as Van Gogh was confined to his room in the psychiatric institution for most of his stay.

It offers a great contrast to Starry Night Over the Rhône, thanks to its distinct style and creative process. The painting from Saint-Rémy is closer to the ideas Van Gogh learned from Gauguin about abstraction and painting from the imagination, while the Arles painting is very much grounded in a scene observed in reality. Comparing these two works reveals his evolving artistic ideas.

Van Gogh painted another nocturnal scene in Provence right before he left Saint-Rémy in 1890. This piece, titled Country Road in Provence by Night, features a cypress tree under a night sky, with two figures walking in the foreground, similar to Starry Night Over the Rhône. Van Gogh described the painting as “Very romantic if you like, but also ‘Provençal’ I think.” Just like The Starry Night, Country Road in Provence by Night was also probably painted from memory.

Van Gogh considered cypresses characteristic of Provence’s landscape, and this painting may have been created as an ode to the region where he spent almost two years of his life. Unlike the night scene on the Rhône, it is not washed over by the darkness of the night represented by shades of blue. It depicts yellows and greens of the land and a moon giving away a dim light, suggesting a much brighter landscape than Starry Night Over the Rhône.

Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhône represents the way he perceived the night and his development as an artist that allowed him to present such a luminous nocturnal scene. It is one of the few paintings from Arles that does not center on sunlight, instead focusing on the quietness of the countryside at night. With its serene atmosphere, Van Gogh managed to capture the essence of the Provençal night with vivid colors and brushstrokes in a compelling composition.

After his trek through Hell (Inferno), guided by Virgil, Dante comments, relieved: “we emerged, to see—once more—the stars.” The poet, however, will need to journey through Purgatory, where sins are cleansed, before reaching Paradise. Here, guided by his beloved Beatrice, Dante will tackle a series of increasingly complex theological issues, from the coexistence of unity and multitude to the mystery of incarnation. The ineffability of his last supernatural journey repeatedly challenges Dante’s poetic skills, making the Paradiso the Divine Comedy’s most difficult canto. Here is a brief guide to help readers make sense of Dante’s mystical experience.

Dante’s Guide in Paradiso: Who Is Beatrice?

At the beginning of the Divine Comedy, when Dante, having lost the diretta via (the path that does not stray), finds himself in a selva oscura (shadowed forest), a special guide appears to help him: Virgil. The Roman poet explains that he will lead Dante through the nine circles of Hell up to the mountain of Purgatory.

However, as a follower of the pagan religion and unbaptized, Virgil won’t be able to accompany Dante in the final leg of his supernatural journey, where the Florentine poet will reach the beate genti (blessed people) residing in Heaven. “If you would then ascend as high as these,” says Virgil, “a soul more worthy than I am will guide you; I’ll leave you in her care when I depart.”

The new guide appears when Dante climbs to the top of Mount Purgatory, the location of Earthly Paradise. There, Virgil is replaced by Beatrice, the Italian poet’s dead beloved. After rebuking him for straying from the rightful path, thus betraying her memory, Beatrice exhorts Dante to drink from the rivers Lethe and Eunoè to confront and atone for his sins. Then, as the poet is “remade, as new trees are renewed when they bring forth new boughs,” he and Beatrice can finally “climb unto the stars.”

Dante introduced Beatrice in his La vita nuova (The New Life), a 1239 work in which he chronicles his love for and relationship with Beatrice, from the first sight of his beloved at nine years old to his deep mourning after her death. In the last chapter, Dante vows to write in the future about who came to be his ideal woman “that which has never been written of any woman.”

The poet fulfils his promise about 40 years later with his Divine Comedy, where Beatrice serves as both his guide and teacher, helping him address some of the most complex theological issues in Christianity. In the Paradiso, Beatrice, usually identified as Beatrice Portinari, retains her individuality while also being presented as an allegory of divine love and theology.

Indeed, the Divine Comedy, like most works of medieval literature, features different levels of interpretation. As a result, each historical figure with whom Dante interacts is both a “real,” earthly person and an allegory of something else. Moreover, in Dante’s worldview, where everything unfolds according to a divine plan, history and historical figures serve to anticipate future events. In this case, the Beatrice Dante meets in the afterlife is the fulfillment of her earthly qualities: spiritualized love.

Dante’s Cosmology: The Nine Heavens

The first canto of Paradiso begins when Dante is still physically at the top of Mountain Purgatory. Aware that he is about to write about topics that usually elude human understanding, the poet asks Apollo and the godly force for help to “show the shadow of the blessed realm inscribed within my mind.”

Moreover, Dante himself needs trasumanar (pass beyond the human) to enter the divine realm, an experience that “cannot be worded.” In the Divine Comedy, God’s realm is composed of nine heavens and the Empyrean, the immaterial region where God resides. Following the Ptolemaic understanding of the universe, Dante places the earth at the center of his cosmos.

Surrounded by spheres of air and fire, the planet is part of the so-called “sublunar world,” subject to change. The nine concentric celestial spheres, on the other hand, are immune to corruption. The first sphere, the Heaven of the Moon, is home to the souls of those who failed to fulfill their vows. From there, Dante travels to the Heaven of Mercury, where he encounters those who lived with too much ambition. In the third celestial sphere, the Heaven of Venus, reside those who loved with too much ardor.

The fourth heaven, the Heaven of the Sun, is past the earth’s shadow. As a result, its souls are described in positive terms. There, Dante meets the wise. In the fifth sphere, the Heaven of Mars, reside the warriors of faith. The Heaven of Jupiter, the sixth celestial circle, is home to the just rulers. The souls of contemplative thinkers reside in the Heaven of Saturn. In the eighth sphere, the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, Dante witnesses the triumph of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

From there, Dante and Beatrice move to the Primum Mobile, home of the angels, where the poet learns a new kind of world geography (more on that later). Beyond the ninth heaven is the Empyrean, the final leg of Dante’s supernatural journey.

A Divine Order

In Dante’s (medieval) worldview, every element of the universe (including Paradise) is part of a divine order, created according to God’s plan. “All things, among themselves, possess an order; and this order is the form that makes the universe like God,” explains Beatrice in the first canto of Paradiso.

The relationship of one part of the universe to another, as well as the relation of all things to their divine creator, is the great theme underlying the last cantica of the Comedy. As its 33 cantos offer an exploration of the harmonic structure of creation—and the truth about reality and humanity—the Paradiso has often been referred to as Dante’s most “mystical” work.

Influenced by Scholasticism, the leading philosophical system of the Middle Ages and, especially, by St. Thomas of Aquinas, Dante aims to encompass reality as a whole in his poem. More importantly, believing that the world can be (rationally) explained through a harmonic conceptual system, the Florentine poet sees the Comedy as a means to restore the right order (diritta via), lost amid the political (and spiritual) turmoil of his time.

Endowed with intelligence and free will, human beings are the only creatures able to stray from the right track. On the other hand, their yearning for knowledge makes them the only created being capable of discerning the divine truth, the ultimate meaning of the universe.

“The Great Sea of Being”: The One and the Many

Dante presents the idea of the universe as a harmonic creation of God in the opening verses of the Paradiso, where he states: “the glory of the One who moves all things permeates the universe.” However, the celebration of the “oneness” of all things with their creator is immediately followed by a paradox: God’s glory “glows in one part more and in another less.”

The coexistence of unity and diversity is one of the central themes of the Paradiso. While everything that exists is created and sustained by God (the existence itself), some parts of the universe receive a lesser amount of divine light.

To explain the paradox of “the One and the Many,” the same paradox captured by the Christian concept of the Trinity, Dante resorts to an ontological metaphor: lo gran mar de l’essere (the great sea of being). While all things derive and tend to the same end (God), “every nature has its bent, according to a different station, nearer or less near to its origin. Therefore, these natures move to different ports across the mighty sea of being, each given the impulse that will bear it on.”

In the third canto of the Paradiso, Dante returns to the relationship between oneness and multiplicity, asking Piccarda Donati (more on her later) whether the souls of the outer heavens envy those nearer to God. In her answer, Piccarda explains how Paradise is the place where souls are at one with God and all desires are always satisfied. Going back to the sea metaphor, Piccarda tells Dante: “And in His will there is our peace: that sea to which all beings move—the beings He creates or nature makes—such is His will.”

In The Undivine Comedy, Teodolinda Barolini notes that Dante “does not so much attempt to resolve as hold up for scrutiny” the paradox of unity and diversity, adding that “our poet seems more to revel in it than to want to cover it over.”

Key Encounters in the Paradiso

During his encounter with Piccarda, Dante not only reflects on the ontological challenges within the “sea of being,” but he also addresses Florence’s history of political violence. Indeed, the Divine Comedy, which the poet started during his exile, is both an allegory of humankind’s hope for redemption and a commentary (and solution) on Italy’s 14th-century political crisis.

The sister of Forense Donati, whom Dante met in Purgatory, Donata was kidnapped from the cloister on the order of her other brother, Corso Donati. Corso was the leader of the Guelfi Neri (Black Guelphs), the faction opposing Dante’s political group, the White Guelphs. It was the Black faction that condemned Dante to death in absentia in 1302.

History and politics are also at the center of the sixth canto. (The sixth canto of each section deals with politics as seen from an increasingly broader perspective, from Florence to the empire.) There, in the Heaven of Mercury, Dante speaks with the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. A complex narrative, the meeting with Justinian frames the Roman Empire (seen as a preparation for the coming of Jesus) within Christian providential history. At the same time, the canto condemns the weakness of the contemporary empire, a pawn in the bloody rivalry between Guelphs and Ghibellines.

In the Heaven of Mars, Dante then delves into his family history during his conversation with Cacciaguida, his great-great-grandfather. In addition to explaining to the poet the origins of his family name, Cacciaguida bemoans the decay and corruption of Dante’s Florence, recalling the idyllic old times, when the city, “sober and chaste, lived in tranquility.” In a show of medieval rhetoric, Dante puts Cacciaguida, a knight killed in the Second Crusade, among the warriors of faith.

The conversation becomes theological once again when Dante meets St. Thomas of Aquinas (Heaven of the Sun) and the first human, Adam. Justinian had already explained how the crucifixion of Jesus was the just punishment for humankind’s original sin. Now, Dante gets to know the true cause of this offense: the trespassing of the boundary placed by God on humankind.

The End of the Journey & the Vision of God

As Dante journeys through the heavenly spheres, he turns his attention to increasingly complex theological issues. In the Primum Mobile, he is even confronted with an alternative perspective of the universe. As in 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 was amazed by the sight of the Earth rising above the lunar horizon, so Dante is granted a unique vision: the image of the universe with God as a luminous point at its center.

After witnessing the angelic hierarchies circling around the center of the universe, Dante and Beatrice enter the Empyrean, the “heaven that is pure light.” In a series of “phantasmagoric visions,” the poet recalls his tour of the inner heavenly realm: a river of light turns into a circle, which then acquires the shape of a hillside and a rose. Finally, the rose turns into a city, the celestial Jerusalem, with an empty throne at the center. The imperial seat awaits Henry VII, the emperor who, in Dante’s political vision, “shall show Italy the righteous way-but when she is unready.”

At the end of the tour of the Rose of the Blessed, Beatrice is replaced by the medieval mystic St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Dante’s guide for the last leg of his journey. St. Bernard urges the poet to pray to the Virgin Mary before directing his gaze to the primo amore (Primal Love), the divine principle holding the universe together.

Lamenting the difficulty to recount his visions, Dante, nevertheless, tries to verbalize his experience: “I saw—ingathered and bound by love into one single volume—what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered: substances, accidents, and dispositions as if conjoined.”

While gazing at the center of the divine light, the poet experiences the true nature of the Trinity: a series of three circles of three different colors, with the third appearing as “fire breathed equally by those two circles.” Then, Dante witnesses a human image appearing within the second circle (the Son), representing the mystery of the incarnation.

Finally, in the final verses of the Paradiso, Dante reaches his goal, the vision of God: “Here force failed my high fantasy; but my desire and will were moved already—like a wheel revolving uniformly—by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

What we think of as Irish literature is a multifaceted phenomenon, shaped to some extent by the ever-changing relationship between the island and its near neighbor, Britain. All of the following writers wrote primarily in English (though some also knew Irish). Some came from Anglo-Irish backgrounds, growing up in England and spending only a brief time in their homeland. Others lived and breathed Ireland, and their writing is saturated with local characters, beliefs, traditions, and turns of phrase. You may already know that Irish literature boasts the playwright Oscar Wilde, poet W.B. Yeats, and novelist James Joyce—but who else does it count among its leading lights?

1. Oscar Wilde

Irish literature is known all around the world thanks to the country’s longstanding devotion to nurturing literary talent, a tradition that survives today. It’s also known, in part, thanks to certain great names: Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce.

The flames of Wilde’s fame were undoubtedly fanned by circumstances beyond his writing, namely his arrest and imprisonment for “gross indecency” (or homosexual acts) in 1895. Yet the Dublin-born writer, who spent most of his adult life in England, was always destined to go down in literary history. He cultivated a penchant for the epigram, a short, witty saying which often revolves around reversing expectations or a pair of qualities: “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing,” as a character states in his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1895).

Wilde was also one of the most popular playwrights in 1890s London. He took up the genre of the drawing room play and infused it with his epigrammatic wit in plays such as Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). These have gone down as archetypes of Victorian Englishness, despite Wilde’s Irish background (his mother, Speranza, was a poet with a strong interest in Irish nationalism and folklore).

2. W.B. Yeats

Two years after Wilde’s biggest theatrical success and great fall from grace, his compatriot, Yeats, pledged to open an Irish Literary Theatre, which ran from 1899 to 1901. Though short-lived, it laid the groundwork for the more successful (and still running) Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a home of the groundswell in Irish literary activity in the 20th century.

Yeats was also the foremost poetic chronicler of the Celtic Twilight (another name for the revival of interest in Celtic, Gaelic, and Irish culture in the late 19th century). His own poetry brought together Irish folk tales with classical allusions and an interest in spiritualism.

3. James Joyce

If Yeats’s language looked towards modernism, with its frequent recourse to imagery and symbolism, James Joyce’s works brought Irish literature and modernism together definitively. Like Yeats, he was interested in traditional Irish stories as well as classical mythology, depicting ordinary urban life in the short stories that made up Dubliners (1914), before retelling Homer‘s Odyssey in a stream of consciousness style in Ulysses (1922).

Finnegans Wake (1939) is perhaps his most formidable work, moving towards the invention of a new language, resembling English but in a highly idiosyncratic distortion. Like several of the following writers, Joyce wrote most of his works outside Ireland, living in various European cities, including Paris and Zurich.

4. Jonathan Swift

A master of satire, Jonathan Swift is also known as Dean Swift, in reference to his day job as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin during the early 18th century. From this prominent position, Swift—son of English parents who had moved to Ireland following their support of the royalist cause during the English Civil War—was able to get involved in politics, both locally and further afield in London.

His politics varied, oscillating widely as did the terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ themselves in this period. However, from his writing, we can safely say that Swift supported the cause of Ireland, a nation ruled from afar by the British monarchy.

Works such as A Modest Proposal (1729) weaponized a highly ironic style to urge readers to recognize the harsh conditions foisted upon Irish people under British rule.

A Modest Proposal is an essay that begins fairly ordinarily, lamenting the starvation of poor people across the country. Eventually, Swift makes his ‘modest’ proposal: children can be “most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled,” so why should poor people not eat them? It was an extreme way of drawing attention to poor people’s plight and the dehumanizing solutions put forward by politicians.

Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726) satirizes the popular subgenre of travel literature, although it is now celebrated as much for its sprawling imagined geography—including the land of the Houyhnhnms, where talking horses reign over the human-like Yahoos—as for its underlying political commentary.

5. Maria Edgeworth

Like Swift, Maria Edgeworth came from an Anglo-Irish background. Her father was a politician and landowner (as well as inventor and father to 22 children), whose estate was named after the family: Edgeworthstown, in County Longford.

Maria Edgeworth grew up with a wealth of firsthand experience of Anglo-Irish landlordism, overseeing the day-to-day life of servants, tenants, and ordinary working Irish people. Both Edgeworth and her father were relatively progressive, supporting Catholic Emancipation and women’s education.

Edgeworth’s novels are reflections of this perspective on Irish country life, as well as important examples of Enlightenment and early Romantic ideals in an Irish literary context. For Castle Rackrent (1800), Edgeworth drew on her own family’s history of mismanaging its estate, telling the tale of the castle’s fluctuating fortunes over four generations.

Not only did the novel inspire Sir Walter Scott to write his Waverley series of novels (sometimes considered among the earliest examples of historical fiction), but it also inaugurated a subgenre which would be integral to Irish literature in English for over a century to come: the Big House novel. These novels centered on a large estate, the Anglo-Irish family that owns it, and their relations with the Irish people and places around them. (It is possibly merely coincidental, but telling as to the Irish perspective on these houses, that ‘big house’ has also long been a slang term for ‘prison’.)

6. Lord Dunsany

When we think of Irish writers born in the 19th century, several names might spring to mind: Oscar Wilde, beloved for his wit and wisdom; W.B. Yeats, poetic chronicler of the Celtic Twilight (another name for the revival of interest in Celtic, Gaelic, and Irish culture in the late 19th century); and James Joyce, innovative author of enduring literary mind-bogglers such as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Possibly more prolific than these three put together is the lesser-known Lord Dunsany. Born Edward Plunkett in London, he was heir to the peerage of Dunsany, and after inheriting the title aged 22, lived for most of his life in Dunsany Castle, in County Meath.

This was Dunsany’s base for his participation in the thriving Irish literary culture of the early 20th century, when he worked with Yeats and Lady Gregory, co-founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a breeding ground for many of Ireland’s most significant playwrights.

Plays did feature among the 90 or so works Dunsany wrote, but his greatest influence was as a writer of short stories and novels in the fantasy genre. He has been cited or detected as a precursor in writing by J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, H.P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, and Guillermo del Toro.

7. J.M. Synge

Like Dunsany, Synge was a playwright closely involved with Yeats, Gregory, and Edward Martyn’s Abbey Theatre. It had been open for just three years when it courted a major scandal with the opening of Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World in 1907.

Synge had been interested in his native language and culture for some time before writing this play. He had extended his university studies in Hebrew and Irish by undertaking further research into Irish folklore and tradition on the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway. He did not limit himself to patriotic studies: like many literary figures around the turn of the 20th century, Synge was a cosmopolitan, traveling and studying in Germany, Italy, and France.

After meeting Yeats, Gregory, and Martyn, Synge became even more devoted to writing about Irish life and people, and started producing plays which attracted the attention—and often critique—of figures among the prominent Irish nationalist movement of the early 1900s. Many of these figures had strong ideas about how the representation of Irish people, especially their attitudes to religion, sex and gender, and work, could impact support for the nationalist movement.

The Playboy of the Western World, set in County Mayo, tells the story of a young man who boasts that he has killed his father and becomes celebrated by local women as a hero, only for it to transpire that his father has not died, so he attacks him again. Nationalists attending the premiere decried the play’s immorality, outraged at Synge’s representation of the Irish working class and of Irish women, and riots broke out across Dublin.

After the outbreak of violence at the premiere, the remainder of The Playboy of the Western World had to be mimed. This meant that audiences missed out on hearing Synge’s greatest achievement: his lyrical language, meticulously representing the dialect of English spoken by Irish people. Synge is now praised for this linguistic mastery as well as his realism.

8. Elizabeth Bowen

Somewhere between Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen’s writing is acutely conscious of place, and that place is often Ireland, where she spent her early childhood and intermittent periods of her adulthood.

The Last September (1929) is a Big House novel like Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, and similarly draws on the author’s autobiography. Bowen inherited the family home, Bowen’s Court in County Cork, in 1930. In The Last September, she combines her idyllic memories of a charmed countryside childhood with the sociopolitical backdrop of Ireland’s struggle for independence.

Bowen was fascinated by Ireland, feeling “an extraordinary ambivalent attitude towards it” as someone with, as she felt, only a partial claim to a heritage which was gradually eroding, the old families and houses disappearing  “like patterns fading out of a textile.”

Elsewhere, she reflected on the “slight inflection” implied in the term Big House, its hint of “hostility, irony” (Lee 1999, p. 26). Nonetheless, each of these houses “seems to live under its own spell” (Lee 1999, p. 25). The same could be said about the finely wrought houses in many of her other books, set outside Ireland, such as The Heat of the Day (1949) and The House in Paris (1936).

9. Flann O’Brien

Two hundred years after Jonathan Swift mixed politics and literature, there came Flann O’Brien—one of the many pen-names of the civil servant Brian O’Nolan. Throughout his career, O’Brien wrote fiction and journalism under a variety of pseudonyms to hide the fact that these send-ups of political processes were coming from the heart of politics itself.

Much of O’Brien’s journalism was published during a 20-year period during which he is sometimes said to have withdrawn from writing fiction. His first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), was a roaring success with critics, lionized by such literary giants as Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, and James Joyce. After his next novel, The Third Policeman, was rejected, O’Brien started a rumor that he had lost the manuscript on a countryside drive. (It was, in fact, hidden in his sideboard—and the novel was published posthumously in 1967.)

Yet O’Brien did not retire from writing fiction, only fiction in English. His next novel was published in 1941 and was titled An Béal Bocht. Written in Irish, it is the imagined autobiography of a poor Irishman who faces various misfortunes, and was published under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen, which O’Brien was using for his Irish-language newspaper columns.

This interplay between Irish and English sets O’Brien apart from a writer with whom he is often paired (and who was something of a bête noire for him), James Joyce. Both were master absurdists, practitioners of ludic metafictional nonsense. However, where Joyce was immersed in cosmopolitanism thanks to his time on the Continent (he spent the majority of his life away from his homeland), O’Brien never left Ireland. Like his somewhat unlikely predecessor, Swift, he wove Dublin, with its culture, its language, its people, and their quirks, into his playful and satirical works.

10. Samuel Beckett

Many of Irish literature’s finest practitioners wrote their best work outside Ireland: Wilde and George Bernard Shaw in London, Joyce in Paris and Switzerland. Samuel Beckett was another, spending most of his life in Paris, but like his friend Joyce, and like Flann O’Brien, Beckett was undeniably influenced by his early years in the literary atmosphere of Dublin.

Beckett was a key figure in literary modernism. In his early years, as a critic, he made important connections between contemporary Irish poetry and modernist writing coming from London and Paris.

Coming into his own as a playwright in the 1950s, he extended that connection, composing most of his plays in French before translating them into English himself. The same goes for his best-known novels, including the trilogy beginning with Molloy in 1951.

Claiming that it was easier to write “without style” in French than English, Beckett innovated a prose that was entirely his own, borne out of his Irish upbringing, his thorough knowledge of literature in English, and his immersion in Parisian culture in the cafés of Paris’s Left Bank.

En attendant Godot (premiered in 1953), Beckett’s best-known play, is typical of his interest in stripped-back theater, with few characters and very little plot, allowing for rumination and philosophical speculation which often borders on the absurd.

11. Iris Murdoch

Although born in Dublin to Irish parents, Iris Murdoch lived for most of her life in England. As an adult, she expressed conflicting views on her heritage. She wrote to her fellow philosopher Philippa Foot that “I feel unsentimental about Ireland to the point of hatred,” but this musing did come about while she was on her way to a conference on Irish literature.

Murdoch, along with Foot, was one of several notable young women who became renowned as philosophers during and after World War II. Like her contemporary across the Channel, Simone de Beauvoir, Murdoch channeled her philosophy into fiction too.

Oxford, where Murdoch studied from 1938 to 1942 and returned to live for most of her adult life, was a hotbed for philosophical thought in this period, playing host to academics who found themselves refugees, including Ernst Cassirer, Eduard Fraenkel, and Isaiah Berlin. Murdoch was part of a movement that sought to restore metaphysics to philosophy, and her fiction blended this interest with her inclination towards moral philosophy.

Her first novel, Under the Net (1954), explored the quandary of useless philosophizing in a comic mode. Later novels, such as The Sea, The Sea (1978), which won the Booker Prize in 1978, interrogate the motivations and interior lives of characters who are placed in morally complex situations.

Murdoch may have been ambivalent about her Irish heritage, but the themes and style of her fiction are reminiscent of an Irish predecessor she admired and with whom she was friends: Elizabeth Bowen.

12. Roddy Doyle

Another Booker Prize-winner born in Dublin is Roddy Doyle, although unlike his predecessor Iris Murdoch, Doyle has remained in his home city for his entire life, suffusing his work with the rich life of the city, especially its working-class neighborhoods.

Doyle’s Booker-winning novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), takes us into the world of a 10-year-old Dubliner in 1968 (when Doyle himself was 10). Living in the Barrytown neighborhood, Paddy narrates his youth: a mixture of carefree hijinks and dim awareness of the adult world around him.

Barrytown was also the setting for a trilogy of novels starting with The Commitments in 1987, all of which were made into films. The Commitments charts a young man’s quest to band together a group of soul musicians and make it big, while The Snapper deals with pregnancy outside marriage—still a source of controversy in traditional, working-class Irish families.

Doyle has become one of Ireland’s most popular novelists today, celebrated for his dialogue-heavy style, which brings characters to life through a vivid use of voice and dialect.

13. Colm Tóibín

In what has become something of a tradition for Ireland’s great writers, Colm Tóibín blends the rich literary tradition of his homeland with a cosmopolitan perspective gained through spending time away from Ireland. He lived for a few years in Barcelona in his youth, and now lives in America, where he has been a visiting professor at several major universities.

Born in County Wexford, Tóibín often sets his novels in Ireland, sometimes dealing with characters who leave their homeland and have to navigate a sense of split identity—as in Brooklyn (2009), which was adapted as a film in 2015.

Elsewhere, Tóibín’s fiction delves into its protagonists’ deep-seated senses of self: introspective novels which use language to weave an intricate, if sometimes tortuous, impression of identity. These reflections combine with Tóibín’s interest in masculinity and homosexuality in novels such as The Master (2004) and The Magician (2021), fictionalized versions of the lives of Henry James and Thomas Mann, respectively.

Further Reading

• Lee, Hermione (1999). The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. London: Vintage.

The author of twenty-three short children’s tales, Beatrix Potter became one of the most beloved authors of the 20th century. Supported in her interest in art by John Everett Millais, a renowned artist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the watercolor illustrations she created for her books brought a wealth of memorable characters to life. These characters have withstood the test of time, with their stories continuing to be read to children to this day, over one-hundred and twenty years since Potter first began writing.

Beatrix Potter’s Famous “The Tale of Peter Rabbit”

Beatrix Potter’s first published children’s book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, became one of her most iconic. It famously recounts the story of young Peter Rabbit, along with his sisters, Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail. Against the warnings of his mother, Peter Rabbit ventures into the garden of the nearby Mr. McGregor. After spending a terrifying day being chased by Mr. McGregor, who plans to turn Peter into a rabbit pie, Peter Rabbit learns a painful lesson and is sent to bed by his mother.

This beloved story, which has sold over 40 million copies around the world today, traces its origins back to the author’s personal correspondence. Beatrix Potter initially recounted the story in a letter to Noel Moore, the son of one of her childhood governesses named Annie Moore. Little Noel had been suffering from scarlet fever, and Potter hoped that the story would lift his spirits. She even included an assortment of her own illustrations in the letter she sent him. Since her childhood, Potter had loved keeping a variety of different animals as pets, and in this instance, she drew inspiration from her pet rabbit, Peter Piper, for the main character of the story.

With encouragement from Annie, Potter decided to pursue having the story published as a children’s book, with her own illustrations included. Initially, the story was rejected by multiple publishers. Eventually, however, The Tale of Peter Rabbit was picked up by Frederic Warne & Company, where it was published in October of 1902. It sold 8,000 copies upon its initial publication, and went on to sell thousands more in 1902 alone.

The Tailor of Gloucester

In 1903, Beatrix Potter’s personal favorite of all her tales, The Tailor of Gloucester, was published. In this Christmastime fable, a poor tailor becomes seriously ill whilst in the middle of creating a coat and waistcoat for the Mayor of Gloucester’s wedding. Feeling sympathy for the tailor, a kindly group of mice finishes the coat and the waistcoat for him. The tailor is astonished to return to his shop on Christmas Day and find the coat and waistcoat completed with no indication as to who might have finished the work. The only clue he is able to find is a tiny note next to an unfinished buttonhole reading, “NO MORE TWIST.”

The origins of this story are similar to those of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, having been initially composed for Freda Moore, another child of Annie Moore. In this instance, the story was lifted from a local legend she had heard while spending time in Gloucestershire with her cousin Caroline Hutton in 1894. The legend went that local tailor John Prichard had been working on a suit for Gloucester’s mayor, and had indeed entered his shop one day to find that the suit had been finished for him.

In reality, the suit had been completed by other tailors in the shop, but Prichard liked to boast in the following years that magic had been involved. Potter reworked the legend to incorporate her personal love of animals, including her own creative interpretations of what they might be like if they could talk and sing songs. Her unique vision, accompanied by her own charming watercolor illustrations, is what makes the tale a popular Christmas story to this day.

The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle

Another of Beatrix Potter’s most popular tales is The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, which was published in 1905. Framed by the beautiful scenery of the Lake District, The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle centers around a young girl named Lucie who meets a kindly washerwoman named Mrs. Tiggy-winkle. True to the author’s interest in animals, Mrs. Tiggy-winkle is actually a hedgehog who does the washing for other characters featured in Potter’s stories, including Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, and Squirrel Nutkin. The story ends with Lucie marveling that Mrs. Tiggy-winkle was a hedgehog all along, with the author asserting that she herself is, in her own words, “well-acquainted with Mrs. Tiggy-winkle.”

For The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Beatrix Potter drew inspiration from a wide variety of sources. Originally conveyed in 1902 in a letter to her cousin Stephanie Hyde Parker, the character of Mrs. Tiggy-winkle was lifted from Kitty MacDonald, a laundress who had previously worked for Potter’s parents during their holidays in Scotland. The character of MacDonald was merged with another one of the author’s pets, a real hedgehog named Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, of whom she was extremely fond. Furthermore, the character of Lucie was drawn from one of the author’s own childhood friends, named Lucie Carr. Potter apparently struggled in illustrating the character of Lucie, feeling that she was better at depicting animals than people. To readers today, her struggles are not apparent in the least, with the watercolor illustrations for the story being some of the most breathtaking she ever created.

The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher

The following year, in 1906, The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher was published. In this charming story, the frog Mr. Jeremy Fisher plans a dinner party for his friends Sir Isaac Newton (who, as his name suggests, is a newt) and Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise. Mr. Jeremy goes fishing, planning on serving minnows at the dinner party. After a series of misadventures, Mr. Jeremy barely escapes being eaten by a trout. He ultimately settles on serving his friends roasted grasshoppers and lady-bird sauce, and the three have a pleasant evening together.

Like with The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Beatrix Potter’s inspirations for The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher came from an array of her own experiences. The pets that she had kept throughout her childhood served as one of her initial sources of inspiration, with frogs being among her favorite creatures. Furthermore, one of her father Rupert’s favorite hobbies was fishing, and it seems likely that she drew inspiration from hearing him complain when he was unable to catch anything. Indeed, she seems to have conceived of the story during a time of heavy fishing for her father, as she was holidaying with her family near the River Tay in Scotland while she wrote it.

The story was first sent in a letter to Eric Moore, another one of the Moore children, in 1893. In 1896, a series of Beatrix Potter’s illustrations of Mr. Jeremy was featured by the publisher Ernest Nister in Nister’s Holiday Annual for 1896. Potter later repurchased these illustrations, and used them for the completed tale that was published by Frederic Warne & Company in 1906. In spite of the many years that passed between Potter’s initial conception of the story and its final publication, its intensely personal relationship to the author’s family memories can be felt in the final text and illustrations, making it particularly memorable among her stories for readers today.

The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck

Two years later, in 1908, Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck was published. One of Potter’s darkest stories, it recounts the story of a farmyard duck named Jemima who longs to lay her own nest of eggs. She is convinced by a passing fox to lay her eggs in his wood-shed. Jemima remains oblivious to the fox’s true intentions as he takes increasing notice of her eggs and invites her to a dinner party, and she is finally rescued from being eaten by the farmdog Kep and his puppies. The puppies ultimately eat Jemima’s eggs as a thank you, leaving Jemima distraught. The story ends with the reassurance that Jemima did later successfully lay her own eggs, but that “only four of them hatched.”

The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck was written during a particularly important period in Beatrix Potter’s life. In 1905, she had purchased Hill Top Farm in England’s Lake District after the sudden death of her fiance Norman Warne of Frederic Warne & Company. Beatrix Potter enjoyed her new life at Hill Top in the following years, and the story incorporates many details related to the scenery and people there. For example, it is known that there was a real duck at Hill Top Farm named Jemima, who Potter observed had a somewhat ridiculous nature. Kep, the dog who saves Jemima at the end of the story, was a collie and one of the author’s favorite animals at the farm.

The story is dedicated to the son and daughter of the farm manager at Hill Top, Ralph and Betsy. The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck contains illustrations of both of them, along with their mother. Furthermore, the author’s illustrations contain many picturesque views of Hill Top Farm, including its barn, parts of the main house, and its surrounding landscape. In this way, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck provides a particularly fascinating view for readers today into the daily life of Beatrix Potter at Hill Top Farm.

Beatrix Potter’s Stories Today

Today, Beatrix Potter’s tales are read around the world. They have been translated into a multitude of languages, including Russian, Welsh, and Turkish. Even unpublished works are rediscovered with much excitement, such as Potter’s The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, which was finally published in 2016 with new illustrations by Quentin Blake. This enduring, worldwide popularity is a testament to Beatrix Potter’s personal creativity. Her love for animals, which inspired her detailed representations of these creatures and the worlds they inhabited, continues to inspire young minds in the 21st century. In this way, her art and her stories have kept her vision and imagination alive today.