The United States is responsible for producing some of the most celebrated literary icons in the world. Many towns across the country still retain their strong literary heritage to this day. This list is recommended for bookworms who want to explore the heritage of literary icons and visit childhood homes-turned-museums of authors, statues of them erected in town, or even entire towns that were fictionalized for the settings of famous works. Here are some of the best small towns all bookworms should visit at some point.

1. Hannibal, Missouri

Located along the banks of the Mississippi River, which inspired The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hannibal is the hometown of Samuel Clemens, otherwise known as Mark Twain. The town is home to the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, which includes eight historic buildings, most notably the home where Twain grew up from 1843 to 1853. Go on a self-guided tour of the author’s home and view his personal belongings, handwritten pages of original manuscripts, and displays that explore how he created the characters of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Other landmarks in town pay further homage to the author, such as the Mark Twain Memorial Lighthouse, which sits atop Cardiff Hill, a location featured in his works that was frequented by Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The lighthouse was erected in 1935 as a memorial to Twain on his 100th birthday.

2. Key West, Florida

Key West’s claim to fame is being home to seven Pulitzer Prize winners, more per capita than any other city. After becoming captivated by the island, Ernest Hemingway moved to a Spanish-style villa, which today operates as the Hemingway Home and Museum. It is here that Hemingway penned many of his best works, including To Have and Have Not, set in Depression-era Key West. This is his only novel set in the United States.

Key West was also home to Tennessee Williams, who lived on the island for over 30 years. It is believed that he completed the final draft of A Streetcar Named Desire in the La Concha Hotel in 1947. The Tennessee Williams Museum houses an extensive collection of photographs, first edition plays and novels, and a typewriter used by Williams.

3. Monroeville, Alabama

Monroeville gained the status as the “Literary Capital of America” because of two American writers who called the town home: Harper Lee and Truman Capote. The town of Monroeville was fictionalized as the town of Maycomb, which serves as the setting for Lee’s novels To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman. Several landmarks from the novels can be visited around town, such as the Atticus Finch Monument, which honors the character as an ideal model for non-discriminatory justice.

Other attractions include the Monroe County Museum, housed in the Old Courthouse and featuring exhibits on Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Visitors can stop at the Faulk House marker for Truman Capote’s childhood home, where he lived between 1927 and c. 1933. The house was next door to Harper Lee’s. The Old Courthouse Museum also hosts the live on-stage production of To Kill a Mockingbird each spring as a further celebration of the town’s literary heritage.

4. Amherst, Massachusetts

Amherst is a premier historic literary hub, best known as the home of poet Emily Dickinson, who wrote close to 1,800 poems during her mostly reclusive life in Amherst. Emily Dickinson’s family homestead, where she was born, did most of her writing, and where she died, has been turned into the Emily Dickinson Museum, which houses the largest and most varied collection of objects associated with Emily Dickinson and her family.

But Emily Dickinson is not the only writer associated with Amherst. In fact, she often overshadows many other famous authors who resided in Amherst at some point in their careers. Take a self-guided walking tour along Amherst’s historic streets, which pass the former homes of authors who once lived in Amherst. The route is dotted with signs marking the twelve residences of writers such as Robert Frost, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Robert Francis.

5. Concord, Massachusetts

Concord was the epicenter of the mid-19th-century Transcendentalist movement. Furthermore, the town was home to many acclaimed New England authors, including Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The historic homes of these American literary pioneers have been preserved and can be visited while exploring the town.

The Orchard House is by far one of the most famous homes open to visitors. This is where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, inspired by her childhood growing up with her sisters. The house is open for tours, taking visitors from room to room to view original furniture and personal belongings. The Ralph Waldo Emerson House is preserved by his family and remains decorated much the same way it was throughout Emerson’s lifetime.

6. Oxford, Mississippi

The streets of Oxford are lined with historic antebellum homes, one of which was owned by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner, who lived there for over 30 years. Faulkner based his fictional Yoknapatawpha County on the town and the surrounding Lafayette County, which was the setting for novels such as As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.

Rowan Oak was built in the 1840s, although Faulkner acquired it in the 1930s, when it was in poor condition and needed repairs, which he did himself. The author lived there until his death in 1962, and his funeral was held in the house’s parlor. The house is now owned and maintained by the University of Mississippi. It is open year-round to the public and provides insight into his life and works.

7. Oak Park, Illinois

Hemingway may have fallen in love with Key West, but he was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and spent the first eighteen years of his life there. Oak Park has multiple landmarks around town dedicated to Hemingway. The Ernest Hemingway Birthplace Museum is housed inside the Victorian-era home where he was born in 1899 and spent the first six years of his life.

Other Hemingway sights include the Ernest Hemingway Childhood Home. Although this is a private residence and not accessible to the public, it still stands today and is where Hemingway lived during his high school years. He first began writing and developing his craft in this home. Hemingway’s mother took him to opera houses and museums in Chicago, which helped him appreciate the arts, whereas his father took him to the woods and prairies west of Oak Park to appreciate the outdoors. These experiences prepared him for a life as a writer.

8. Bangor, Maine

The streets of Bangor have been in the imaginations of readers for years. However, they will know it better as the town of Derry, the setting for some of Stephen King’s famous novels, such as It and Insomnia. The Stephen King Tour operates out of Bangor and drives passengers around town on a three-hour tour that stops at between twenty and thirty literary and movie locations, as well as Stephen King’s Former House.

Stephen King’s Former House is a Victorian mansion with iron gates designed to look like spider webs. King no longer lives there, and the house has been turned into a writers’ retreat and an archive of his work. Other sights around town include the sewer drain at the corner of Jackson and Union Streets, which inspired the novel It, and the Paul Bunyan statue, which appeared in the most recent film adaptation of the book.

9. Waukegan, Illinois

This town’s legacy is primarily dedicated to science-fiction and fantasy writer Ray Bradbury, who was born there and spent his formative childhood years. The city was fictionalized for the setting in many of his key works, including Something Wicked This Way Comes. Ray Bradbury Park, formerly Powell Park, was designated a Literary Landmark in 2019. As a child, Bradbury often played in the park and walked through it to get downtown since it is close to the Ray Bradbury Boyhood Home. Although his boyhood home is now a private residence and not accessible to the public, it can still be viewed from the street.

The Fantastic Traveler statue depicts a middle-aged Ray Bradbury riding a retro-style rocket ship with a book in his hand outside of the Waukegan Public Library. The statue stands twelve feet tall and is composed of stainless steel. The Waukegan History Museum is housed inside the former Carnegie Library and features a permanent display of Ray Bradbury’s personal book collection. The exhibit is in a restored room where Bradbury spent much of his time as a child reading and developing a love and passion for stories.

10. Milledgeville, Georgia

For many years, Milledgeville was the home of Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor. She lived at Andalusia Farm between 1951 and 1964, where she wrote many of her highly acclaimed works, such as Wise Blood and A Good Man is Hard to Find. The farm was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and is open to the public for guided tours, not just of O’Connor’s time there, but also the entire lineage of the property when it operated as a dairy and beef cattle farm.

Her resting site can be visited at Memory Hill Cemetery. Self-guided tours are available at the cemetery, which begins at a gazebo and visits 47 points of interest, including O’Connor’s grave, where she is buried alongside her family. Alternatively, you can visit the Georgia College and State University, which O’Connor attended and maintains an archive of manuscripts, photographs, and letters.

Rene Magritte was one of the most prominent Belgian artists of the modern era, closely associated with the Surrealist movement. Although he opposed being categorized as a Surrealist, he nonetheless shared the movement’s profound interest in language and text. However, Magritte saw it as something ephemeral and conditional. In his paintings, Magritte often left written notes or commentary that did not always make immediate sense. Read on to learn more about Rene Magritte’s use of text in his art.

Surrealism & Text: Divorcing Words From Their Meanings Before Rene Magritte

Surrealism started primarily as a literary movement that would gradually expand its principles to painting, sculpture, photography, and film. Andre Breton, the ideological leader of the movement and the author of its manifestos, was a poet and thus was aware of the intricacies of language and its questionable adequacy to the described concepts. He sensed deep and transformative changes in the language of modernity. Little by little, as he wrote, authors began to distrust words, realizing that the boundaries of language were too narrow to grasp the depth of human feeling and expression.

Breton cited Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, who attributed colors to vowels, as the first poet to think of liberating words from their meanings. In his opinion, the duty to signify should be replaced with the poetry of words themselves and the reaction of one word to another. In other words, prescribed meanings were inherently inferior to the rhythm of language and constructed meanings. To construct them, one had to abandon control over words and turn off their reason.

To experiment, Surrealists studied trance, hypnosis, meditation, rituals, and chemical ways to alter one’s consciousness. They were also interested in spiritualism and mediums, yet never believed in their possibility of contacting the dead. Rather, the Surrealists believed it was one of the options to open the door to the unconscious thought processes and desires unbound by rules and morals. The state of trance, just like drugs or alcohol, often provoked irrational and chaotic speech that was radically different from the normative one.

Surrealist studies of verbal and written language were partially fueled by their interest in Eastern cultures and religions. Upon encountering philosophical and cultural systems so radically different from the West, they realized how different systems of meaning could be and how imperfect all of them were.

In visual art, Surrealist exploration of text manifested itself in seemingly nonsensical titles divorced from the work’s visuals. The connection was either cryptic or related to the rhythms of letters, sounds, and brushstrokes. The malfunctioning titles provoked the viewer to search for a clue on their own, interpreting the work according to their own traumas and experiences.

Rene Magritte: Words and Images, 1929

Rene Magritte is perhaps the most famous modern artist from Belgium. His clearly recognizable style and set of symbols are familiar even to those who rarely visit museums. Like many others from his generation, Magritte started his artistic career as an Impressionist before moving on to more progressive and daring forms of art.

Many professionals attribute the strange recurring shapes and elements in his art to his personal experiences. For instance, the recurring motif of a human face completely concealed by fabric is sometimes interpreted as a memory of Magritte’s mother’s suicide. After she threw herself into a river, her body was found with her dress covering her face. Most historians believe that Magritte never actually saw his mother’s body and relied on the words of the artist’s nurse. Still, the impact of his mother’s death on Magritte was harsh enough to settle some images in his mind.

Magritte himself was a highly educated and opinionated artist who did not limit himself solely to painting practice. For quite a while, his writings were overlooked, but now, more and more art historians and lovers turn to them. Lumped together with other Surrealists, Magritte actually opposed the title. He never truly accepted the ideology of Andre Breton, although he sometimes operated within its framework. In his writings, he rejected Breton’s obsession with automatism, claiming that automatic writing and drawing was a matter for psychologists rather than artists.

In 1929, Rene Magritte published a work titled Words and Images. This, however, was not a drawing or a painting but an essay that blended written language with pictorial one. Magritte designed 18 panels that explored the relationship between text, drawing, and the physical world these instruments were supposed to reflect. He mentions that some objects can exist without names, and some assume names that already exist, such as the French word le canon, which refers both to an artillery cannon and the accepted standard of any sort. In some cases, an image of an object can replace the word for it in the text, and a word can substitute (although inaccurately) the actual object. Moreover, the purpose of an object is never the same as the purpose of its image or the word for it: you cannot ride a painted horse and cannot eat a description of a restaurant dish.

The Interpretation of Dreams, 1930s

In his paintings from the late 1920s, Magritte deliberately replaced the names for their objects with something unexpected and unusual, aiming to trigger a chain of associations and provoke confusion. Magritte’s first work directly built around the relationship between visuals and text was a series. Titled The Interpretation of Dreams, it was a collection of realistically painted images with nonsensical titles—a horse was labeled as the door, a knife as the bird, and so on. Deliberately mismatched words and images forced the viewer to think about the absurd conventionality of language and how words on themselves mean nothing without a collective agreement to indicate something.

Another significant trait of Magritte’s works was their background. The artist made the canvas look like a typical school blackboard. The choice was hardly merely stylistic. By using the universally recognized image, Magritte brought his audience back to the time when they just started to learn the peculiarities of written and spoken language and to study the connection between them. Children are taught to accept the rules of the game without asking questions. In the Surrealist mind, however, childish perception, with the purity of its experiences, was the key to the unconscious. Childhood was a mythical concept and a condition between the material and metaphysical world, holding within itself endless intellectual and spiritual resources.

The Treachery of Images, 1929

Magritte’s obsession with the dissonance between the real, the painted, and the textual further revealed itself in one of his most famous works. The Treachery of Images represented a rather simple illustration painting of a pipe with a handwritten commentary that this was not, in fact, a pipe. Although the image provokes initial confusion, the viewer soon comes to the conclusion that the artist was right. You can neither smoke this pipe nor hold it in your hands. Thus, the image effectively gets divorced from the experience of an actual pipe and represents nothing but a dysfunctional symbol.

This image was reportedly inspired by a commentary by a gallery visitor who claimed that what he saw was not art. By treating words in this way, Magritte presented language as conditional and unsubstantial, highlighting its inherent inferiority to the world of real physical objects. The same applies to visual language, which is capable of convincing illusions and manipulation but not of directly altering reality.

Rene Magritte and The Living Mirror

A sequel to Magritte’s other works on visual and textual symbols, The Living Mirror exploited an approach we would now call conceptual. Instead of actually painting the image conceived in his mind, Magritte described it in white bubbles on a black background—a person laughing, birds singing, a closet cabinet, and a horizon line.

By using text, Magritte managed to incorporate many more effects than he could cram into a painting. He was able to address not only our eyes but also our hearing (the cries of birds), spatial perception (horizon), emotion (a person laughing), and even some tactile senses (a closet cabinet and personal associations with it). Each viewer’s mind is doing the work on their own based on personal experiences. No version of The Living Mirror would be the same, and each one of them would have equal rights to exist. Thus, language seems to be universal but lacks precision, and that, perhaps, is both its flaw and advantage.

Although the word ‘Celtic‘ denotes a group of people who arrived on the British Isles in the first millennium BC, when we refer to Celtic languages today, we do not just mean the language spoken and written by the early Celts. Following their settlement in Britain and Ireland, the ancient Celtic language developed into six modern Celtic languages, whose geographical spread indicates the areas into which the Celts moved as the Anglo-Saxons took over: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx (the Isle of Man), Welsh, Cornish, and Breton (northwestern France).

How Did English Gain Words From Celtic Languages?

Despite the rising cultural and sociopolitical dominance of English over the centuries, including attempts by British colonial powers to stamp out minority languages, the Celtic languages have persisted and remain in use today, to greater or lesser degrees.

Constitutionally, Irish is the first language of the Republic of Ireland, although in practice, English is most people’s first language. Only 2% of the population lives in the region called the Gaeltacht, where Irish is the first language. However, many more Irish people have some knowledge of the language: nearly 2 million as of 2022.

Per the latest census, 17.8% of the population of Wales speaks Welsh, but far more come into frequent contact with it, given that it is taught in primary school and used alongside English in all official documentation. Welsh is considered the least endangered of the Celtic languages, while Manx has dwindled to a purely second-language existence, and Cornish even went through a period of extinction.

Despite these fluctuations, largely caused by the dominance of English at critical moments of standardization, when a combination of developing technologies and legal restrictions shaped the way people spoke and wrote, the Celtic languages have exerted an influence of their own, lending the English language more words than you might expect.

Much of this transference comes through cultural exchange. For instance, English speakers began to use Scottish Gaelic-derived words such as whiskey and Argyle because of their acquaintance with, respectively, the drink and the fabric hailing from areas of Scotland. We know words such as ceilidh, leprechaun, banshee, and shamrock because of interest, particularly from the 19th century onwards, in the culture, history, and legends of the isle of Ireland.

But some of the words the English language has gained from the Celtic language are more surprising and have less obvious histories. Here are ten of them.

1. Trousers

This word came into English along with the garment it referred to, as fashions changed. As Englishmen in the late 16th century began to adopt long lower-body clothing which covered each leg separately, they borrowed the Irish word for close-fitting shorts, triubhas.

Triubhas became trouse or trouze, and as often occurred with words referring to plural items (such as ‘scissors’ or ‘tweezers’), it acquired the -ers ending, becoming trossers by the early 17th century. The additional r may have come from the related word ‘drawers,’ and it’s possible that the verb ‘truss,’ meaning to dress or package up, had an influence on the word along the way too.

2. Slogan

Given the tumultuous history of the various peoples jostling for control of the British Isles over the past two thousand years, including the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Romans, it is not too surprising that English has gained words via warfare.

‘Slogan’ is a descendant of the word slogorne, meaning battle cry, itself deriving from the Gaelic sluagh-ghairm. Clans in Ireland or the Scottish Highlands would send out a sluagh, or army, which would let out an almighty roar, or gairm (a word whose Proto-Indo-European root also gives us the word ‘garrulous,’ or excessively talkative).

By the beginning of the 18th century, this word was being used to describe political catchphrases, though it was more commonly spelled slughon. It could also be spelled slughorn, though this is no relation to the word for the misshapen horn of a cow or an ox.

3. Tory

No stranger to slogans, the Tory party has existed in the United Kingdom since the late 17th century, just after the English Civil War. The Tories were Royalists, while their opponents, the Whigs, supported Parliament. For the next century, commentators spoke of Whigs and Tories, until the Victorian period, when the terms ‘Conservative’ and ‘Liberal’ became more commonly used.

Throughout this period, the British royal family claimed dominion over Ireland. So, it is perhaps surprising that the name for the Royalist party comes from Irish and originally referred to people displaced by this very claim.

‘Tory’ comes from the Irish word toruighe, which has its roots in the idea of pursuit, and came to mean ‘plunderer.’ By the 17th century, the meaning of toruighe was inflected by the sociopolitical landscape of Ireland, referring to Irish people who took revenge on English settlers by plundering their land. It came to denote Irish Catholics who turned to robbery and outlawry after English settlement laws deprived them of their rights to own land on religious grounds.

Through this latter usage, ‘Tory’ came to be applied to supporters of the Catholic James Stuart, later James II, in his claim to the English throne. After his deposition in 1688 in favor of the Protestant monarchs William and Mary, a party was formed consisting of former Royalists and other supporters of the former Catholic monarchy, including a group called the Yorkshire Tories. Now completely divorced from its context across the Irish Sea, the name for the English party stuck.

4. Bother

A word arising not long after Tory is ‘bother,’ which similarly comes from contact between the English and Irish, although in the world of literature rather than politics.

The 18th century produced a handful of writers from Ireland who made their names writing in English, but used the language in particular ways that were typical of English speakers in Ireland. These included the playwright Thomas Sheridan, novelist Lawrence Sterne, and the satirist, essayist, and dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Jonathan Swift.

One word Sheridan, Sterne, and Swift used was ‘bother,’ a verb meaning ‘to bewilder, confuse, or give trouble to.’ It’s possible that this word was formed through a modification of the noun pother, connoting trouble or disturbance, and that both came from the Irish bodhairim, meaning ‘I deafen.’

5. Hubbub

Etymologists are not entirely certain of the origins of the word ‘hubbub,’ which has been used since the mid-16th century to describe chaotic noise or commotion. Some suggestions are that it comes from the Gaelic ub, a negative word expressing aversion, or the Irish abu, which, like slogan, relates to battle.

Buide in Old Irish meant ‘victory,’ and abu was a victorious battle cry. Hubbub could then be a derivation based on the raucous shouts of the winning side in a battle, though it is now generally used in more trivial contexts.

6. Galore

Used to express abundance, ‘galore’ suggests having plenty of something, perhaps even more than you can manage. Think, “the ceremony had prizes galore,” or, “there’ll be drinks galore at the party.”

First appearing in English in the 17th century, the word has equivalents in Irish, go leór, and Scottish Gaelic, gu leóir. Both phrases come from the Old Irish word roar, meaning ‘enough.’ With the particle go or gu, it becomes an adverb; as in, to ‘have galore’ of something.

7 & 8. Penguin and Puffin

Both of these bird names have unclear origins, but may come from Celtic words, despite the fact that penguins are not found in the British Isles, while the word ‘puffin’ was originally applied to a different and unrelated bird.

‘Penguin’ arose as a synonym for a now extinct bird called the great auk. According to some dictionaries, Welsh-speaking explorers observed this bird (black, with a white belly; flightless, but a good swimmer) on an island in northeast Canada called White Head Island.

Pen is Welsh for ‘head,’ while gwyn means ‘white.’ This explanation has been disputed since penguins’ heads are black, not white. It is possible, though, that the ‘white head’ idea came from the white rings around some penguins’ eyes, or the alternative usage of pen to mean ‘front,’ meaning the pen gwyn is a bird with a white front.

‘Puffin,’ meanwhile, may have Manx or Cornish origins. The Manx shearwater is a seabird that was known as the Manx puffin in the 17th century. It bears the binomial name Puffinus puffinus, despite not being related to the birds we call puffins today (the most common being the Atlantic puffin).

Why was the Manx bird called a puffin? The Latin binomial name seems to come from earlier variants (possibly originating in a Celtic language such as Cornish), such as pophyn, poffin, and puffing, which may have been influenced by the verb ‘puff.’ The nestlings of the shearwater were a delicacy until the late 18th century, especially the fatter ones, which looked puffed-up.

Atlantic puffins, which can be seen off British shores, acquired the name of the unrelated Manx seabird in the 18th century. Its Latin name, Fratercula arctica, meanwhile, refers to the similarity between a puffin’s plumage and a monk’s habit, frater coming from the Latin for ‘friar.’

9. Pixie

There are records in English of pixies, small fairy or sprite-like creatures believed to inhabit woodlands and moorlands, dating back to the 16th century. Early references connect these creatures to ideas of bewilderment or being led astray, as in ‘pixy-paths’ and being ‘pixie-led.’

The etymology of ‘pixie’ is not clear. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests it was formed from the word ‘puck,’ for a mischievous sprite (as in the Shakespeare character), and the diminutive ending ‘-sy.’ The word is documented across large parts of Southern England, but the highest concentration of references to pixies was in Devon and Cornwall, where they were believed to be particularly prevalent. It’s possible, then, that the word ‘pixie’ is of Cornish origin. Similar creatures exist in the legends of other Celtic-derived cultures (Irish, Manx, Welsh, and Breton), but the names vary widely depending on location.

One word with more definite Cornish origins, although it is a local dialect word rather than a widely used English word originating in the Cornish language, is ‘dumbledore.’ Any buzzing insect was a dore in Middle English, while ‘dumble,’ like the ‘bumble’ part of ‘bumblebee,’ seems to refer to its movements.

10. Brat

Before it meant an assertive if messy party girl, courtesy of popstar Charli XCX, ‘brat’ was a mischievous or annoying child, but long before that, it was a kind of cloak or apron.

In the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer’s writing includes the word bratt, for a cloak of coarse cloth, and this has Celtic roots: Old Irish has the same word for cloak or cloth.

By the 16th century, the word had come to refer to a child, possibly one who was unplanned or unwanted (differing from ‘bastard’ in that a married couple, especially perhaps a poorer couple, might find themselves burdened with a ‘brat’). This may have had something to do with the clothing that a child might wear: a ‘brat’ could be a poor, neglected child, dressed in the cloak or apron once known as a bratt. 

‘Brat,’ by the 19th century, suggested lower-class children for whom the parents struggled to provide, and might have to dress in the cheap clothing denoted by the former meaning of bratt. From there, the word gained its modern connotations of bad manners, via the idea of being poorly bred, shedding its connection with the idea of wearing rags. Only in very recent years has the word gained positive connotations, still disconnected from its Celtic origins, but now with a tinge of glamor and fun.

Walking around Lisbon is the perfect opportunity to find the most striking murals and installations. You will find incredible art pieces at the most unexpected locations.

For many years, Lisbon saw its buildings covered with unwanted tags. Then, in 2009, the Lisbon City Council opened the Galeria de Arte Urbana (GAU — Urban Art Gallery), whose purpose was to encourage street art and stop people from vandalizing buildings. At the time, GAU invited several artists to create new pieces.

Today, you can find thousands of urban art pieces scattered around Lisbon. In this article, you will find some of the most famous murals and installations.

1. Desassossego by AkaCorleone

Desassossego is a stunning psychedelic mural designed by AkaCorleone. In his hometown, the artist paid tribute to Fernando Pessoa, one of the most intriguing Portuguese writers.

Pessoa was a prolific writer who developed several heteronyms and left hundreds of works unfinished or unpublished. One of them was Livro do Desassossego, a book written by Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa’s heteronyms. This masterpiece is a remarkable autobiography of Bernardo Soares and was published 47 years after Pessoa’s death. It tries to answer Modernism’s fundamental questions, such as “Who am I?” or “How can I explain reality?”

AkaCorleone captured Pessoa’s delusional essence with this incredible piece. According to the artist’s own words, the mural is called Desassossego since it “represents in a very free way the character that most represents the city of Lisbon, Fernando Pessoa, in a psychedelic dream.”

The Underdog Gallery provided materials for the work and documented the process on video.

AkaCorleone’s real name is Pedro Campiche; he is a Portuguese artist of Swiss descent born in Lisbon in 1985. Graffiti marked his first steps in the art world. However, his repertoire developed to include brightly colored murals and sculptures, which include graphics and typography as part of his signature style.

2. Look Up by AkaCorleone

Another mesmerizing piece by AkaCorleone was created in February 2020 amidst the global pandemic. It was designed for SEAT Art Cities, a project curated by Vhils.

In this piece, the artist was looking to explore the obsessive connection to social media that stops us from enjoying the world around us without realizing all that we are missing out on.

Yet, this piece also represents the profound irony we experienced during the lockdown. While we may be glued to screens and addicted to unstoppable scrolling, the thing that prevents us from enjoying the world becomes our escape from real life.

3. Sophia by Daniel Eime

In the Graça neighborhood, in the heart of Lisbon, you can admire this beautiful stenciled portrait of Sophia de Mello Breyner Anderson (1919-2004) by Daniel Eime.

Sophia was one of the most influential Portuguese poets of the 20th century. During her lifetime, Sophia published several works, including children’s books, and translated a handful of literary masters such as Dante and Shakespeare.

Since Sophia had always been connected to this Lisbon neighborhood, this was the perfect location to pay tribute to her.

Daniel Eime, a Portuguese artist born in Caldas da Rainha in 1986, is the author of this incredible piece. He is considered a master of stencil art, a technique that uses stencils made of paper or cardboard to build an image. For Daniel, most of his stencil creations are inspired by human faces.

4. Tropical Fado in RGB Tones by OzeArv

This must be one of the most eye-catching murals in Lisbon. It was created in 2021 and is one of the 100 urban art pieces selected by the online community Street Art Cities.

Tropical Fado in RGB Tones is a striking urban art piece by OzeArv, a renowned Portuguese artist born in Lisbon in 1980. His murals often depict vivid and colorful representations of birds and other natural elements. Tropical Fado is no exception.

The mural was supported by Lisbon City Council and São Vicent Parish and curated by Galeria de Arte Urbana. Although the artist had the support of a crane and an operator, it took over a month to complete. OzeArv started by outlining the design on the building façade and then filling it in with bold colors.

It might seem that the artist followed a strict design, however, during the process he left some room for imagination. The result is an explosion of color filled with impressive details that combine natural and realistic elements with stylized drawings.

5. Peace Guard by Shepard Fairey

Inspired by the Carnation Revolution, Shepard Fairey created this powerful mural symbolizing peace and freedom.

On the 25th of April 1974, a peaceful and bloodless revolution led by the Portuguese military ended António Salazar’s 40-year dictatorship. At the time, soldiers on the streets placed red carnations in their rifles to celebrate the end of the regime.

As an activist who defends peace and freedom, this was something Shepard Fairey could easily relate to. So, in 2017, Fairey made a mural of a woman soldier with a red carnation on her rifle while looking up as if she was standing in formation. The original design, built in 2017, used red as the main color. Yet, in 2023, during a trip to Lisbon, Fairey decided to retouch his masterpiece by changing the red to blue.

Shepard Fairey is an American artist and activist famous for his Obama “Hope” poster design for the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Fairey is currently considered one of the most influential street artists, having his pieces displayed in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Lisbon.

6. Universal Personhood Lisbon by Shepard Fairey & Vhils

Universal Personhood is a series of art pieces by Shepard Fairey, whose goal is to promote peace and equality. This was inspired by the systematic prejudice against Arabs and Muslims when it comes to discrimination against women.

During a trip to Lisbon in 2018, during the Printed Matters Lisbon Exhibition, Fairey partnered with Vhils to develop a new mural under the Universal Personhood Project.

Alexandre Farto, also known as Vhils, is a Portuguese visual artist born in Lisbon in 1987. He became famous worldwide for his unique bas-relief carving technique, where he removes a wall’s surface layers with unusual tools to create impressive portraits.

The mural depicts a young woman painted in bold and warm colors on the left and sculpted onto the building’s façade on the right. This striking masterpiece’s goal is to call for equal rights for women of all ethnicities and religions.

7. Amália by Vhils

In 2015, Vhils accepted a challenge by Portuguese filmmaker Ruben Alves to create a portrait of the late Fado singer Amália Rodrigues. At the time, Alves was preparing a Fado music record performed by contemporary Fado singers as a tribute to Amália. He figured Fado music was born in the streets, much like Vhils’ artwork.

Unlike other urban art pieces, Vhils created a one-of-a-kind portrait of Amália Rodrigues in Portuguese Cobblestone in the Alfama neighborhood, the birthplace of Fado. With this piece, Vhils draws attention to the craftsmanship of the “calceteiros,” the pavers who keep the Portuguese Cobblestone alive. Simultaneously, the artist also pays tribute to Fado, Amália Rodrigues, and Lisbon culture.

The result is a mesmerizing artwork resembling an ocean wave starting from the ground and moving up the wall. This way, when it rains, it looks like Amália is crying over the Portuguese Cobblestone, a literal representation of the Portuguese saying “Faz chorar as pedras da calçada”—something deeply saddening that makes anyone cry, things which Fado singers used to sing about while wandering Lisbon’s streets.

8. Saudade by Mário Belém

“Saudade” is a unique word in the Portuguese language that it is impossible to translate. Although there are several synonyms in other languages, none truly captures the saudade’s meaning. It translates to the feeling of nostalgia and longing for something or someone so intense and deeply saddening.

Mário Belém, a Portuguese artist born in 1977 in Lisbon, tried to capture the saudade feeling people experienced during the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. His goal was to represent how we keep longing for the past and not giving ourselves the chance to enjoy the good parts of such difficult times. Once the second lockdown was in place, this mural gained a new meaning, representing a wish for a brighter future.

The mural represents a woman sitting at the edge of a colorful flower pot while gazing upon the word “saudade.” We can feel the woman’s nostalgic feeling of longing for the world to go back to what it once was and the sense of being isolated and lost in her own thoughts.

In the bottom right corner, you can read the words: “Antes perdida por aqui algures, do que a caminho de nenhures” which literally translates to “Better to be lost here somewhere than on my way to nowhere.”

9. Adapta by Add Fuel

Add Fuel is the man behind this stunning mural from 2021. The artist was inspired by people’s resilience and ability to adapt (Adapta) and face the unknown times during the global pandemic.

The mural adapts to its surroundings by adjusting the new patterns and colors with the ones on the existing tiles. That is how Add Fuel found the perfect balance between the two buildings.

With this captivating mural, the artist reflects on how people adjust to a new reality, so they can live happily amidst adversity. At the same time, Add Fuel evokes traditional Portuguese tile making.

Add Fuel, born in 1980 under the name Diogo Machado, is a Portuguese visual artist renowned for his reinterpretation of the traditional Portuguese tile design. You can also find his artwork in France, Belgium, and the USA.

10. Poseidon by PichiAvo

The Poseidon mural designed by the Spanish duo PichiAvo is a masterpiece of Lisbon’s street art scene. The Roman God of the Sea overlooks the Tagus River, where numerous sailors have passed over the years.

This striking mural is the perfect blend of classical art and graffiti. While looking at a distance you can clearly admire Poseidon, if you pay close attention, you will notice the graffiti details.

Pichi studied Fine Arts and Avo, Industrial Design. Then in 2007, they met in Valencia’s graffiti art world. Since then, PichiAvo has developed several projects together, seeking a defining trademark style.

Their artwork is scattered around the world. You can admire it in New York, Porto, Lisbon, Paris, Las Vegas, Montreal, Melbourne, and Valencia.

11. Iberian Lynx by Bordalo II

The Iberian Lynx by Bordalo II is one of the most iconic urban art pieces in Lisbon.

You can admire this multicolored giant lynx at Parque das Nações; it is completely made of waste. The artist’s goal was to raise awareness of an endangered species in the Iberian Peninsula while leaving his own remarks on environmental pollution.

The Iberian Lynx sculpture is part of the Big Trash Animals series. All pieces are entirely made of waste materials that pollute the environment and threaten the animals Bordallo II represents.

Bordallo II is a visual artist born in Lisbon in 1987. He is the grandson of the famous Portuguese painter Artur Real Chaves Bordalo. So far, Bordalo II has used over 60 tons of trash to build these magnificent installations. You can admire his work in Portugal, Switzerland, Italy, the United States, and France.

12. Big Racoon by Bordalo II

Big Racoon is another installation from the Big Trash Animals series by Bordalo II.

This stunning artwork is made of several types of waste, from car bumpers and tires to all sorts of plastic. It was clearly made to be seen from a distance. If you stand too close, you will lose sight of the bigger picture, but you can observe the materials it is made of. The colors light up the image, transforming a pile of trash into a cute raccoon.

Go and see it for yourself and take some time to admire this beautiful artwork.

13. Crono Project

The Crono Project began in 2010 and gathered several national and international artists to design a series of murals on abandoned buildings at Avenida Fontes Pereira de Melo in central Lisbon.

Pedro Soares Neves, Angelo Milano, and Vhils co-curated this project and brought unknown artists together to show their artwork. The goal was to create public art instead of tearing down the Art Nouveau buildings.

Thanks to the Crono Project, you can admire the works of BLU, Os Gémeos, or 2-D SAM3. Later that year, Ericailcane, Bastardilla, Lucy, Mar, and Ram also left their artwork on these buildings.

In 2011, Brad Downey and Momo, together with Vhils, painted two abandoned buildings in Alcântara and Avenida Almirante Reis.

Born on the same day at the same hour, Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent most of their lives together as partners in life and work. Their large-scale installations usually involved wrapping objects or manipulating fabric, creating the illusion of movement. One such project was the Running Fence, a white nylon wall that crossed 25 miles of Californian hills. Read on to learn more about the artistic significance of the Running Fence, the famous work by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Who Were Christo and Jeanne-Claude?

Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff) and Jeanne Claude (Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon) were famous artists who shared professional and personal lives for more than five decades. They were born on the same day at the same hour in 1953 and spent most of their lives creating large-scale works that interacted with already existing landscapes.

They came from dramatically different backgrounds. Christo was born in Bulgaria to the family of a fabric factory owner, who lost his business after World War II. As a poor art student, Christo traveled through Europe painting portraits. One such commission was for Jeanne-Claude’s mother in 1958.

Jeanne-Claude was born into a privileged family of French officers in Tunisia, studied in Switzerland, and could have lived a conventional life—had it not been for her meeting with Christo. In 1961, they began creating works together. Jean-Claude died in 2009, and Christo continued to work on their artistic projects for ten more years until he passed away in 2020.

The Origins & Legal Battles of “Running Fence”

Many of Christo and Jeanne Claude’s works were in some way connected to the movement of fabric and the idea of wrapping something in it. They used draperies, so prominent in art of all ages, as separate artistic materials that gave fluidity and dynamism to objects, and transformed them into purely aesthetic elements, erasing their functions. Another important component of their works was their impermanence. Christo and Jeanne-Claude always limited the lifespan of their installations and never repeated those that were already presented once.

The idea for the Running Fence came to Christo and Jeanne-Claude seemingly out of nowhere. In the winter of 1972, they saw a long snow-covered fence that somehow emphasized the landscape it separated with its thin white line. They decided to reconstruct it in California, by asking sixty local farmers permission to use their land. It took them almost two years to obtain all necessary permissions, as California authorities were concerned about the possible ecological impact of the work, as well as the actual artistic value of it. After eighteen public hearings, the couple finally received all the necessary permissions. The construction work began in 1976.

California was not Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s first choice. The initial project had much more grave and politically charged connotations, as it was intended to be built in West Berlin. The fabric fence was supposed to cover the view of the Berlin Wall as if erasing it from the city. However, obtaining permission for such a project in Germany was next to impossible, and artists decided to sacrifice political connotations to ensure the realization of their project.

Constructing the “Running Fence”

The structure of the Running Fence consisted of 238,400 square yards of white nylon fabric, 2,000 steel poles, 145 miles of steel cable, 350,000 hooks, and 13,000 anchors that connected the structure to the ground. The crucial part of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s concept was its complete reversibility. After the project was finished, the artists planned to remove the work leaving no trace of its past presence, and give the remaining materials to construction workers so they could either sell them or repurpose them for their own needs. Economic sustainability was another important aspect of Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s work, as they fully financed their projects on their own, selling artworks specifically created for raising money.

The construction took four months and involved more than 400 workers. All of them were local residents who were fully paid by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The final result was a flowing white wall 16 feet tall and 25 miles long. The artists considered all paperwork and blueprints for the project equally important parts of the work, as well as the 400-page report on the ecological impact of the work on local ecosystems.

Over its short two-week existence, the Running Fence attracted more than 2 million visitors. The thin white strip of a fence seemed to be constantly moving, shaped by the wind and highlighted by rays of sun. One end of the wall dropped directly into the Pacific Ocean, and the other hit US Route 101.

The Reception and Influence of the “Running Fence”

In 1989, just a few months before the demolition of the Berlin Wall, Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky visited Berlin. Born in Leningrad (currently Saint-Petersburg, Russia), in 1940, Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union for his anti-Soviet stance and unconventional poetry in 1972 and spent the rest of his life in the USA. During his trip to Berlin, Brodsky wrote a poem. He called the Wall the “concrete forerunner of Christo” that runs through cities and fields that were colored with scoured blood. Although there is no proof that Brodsky and Christo knew each other, the poet likely visited the couple’s exhibitions or at least read about them.

The Berlin Wall and Christo and Jean-Claude’s fence look formally similar, yet represent entirely different purposes: separating communities versus building them, constructing artificial borders versus cherishing the natural landscape. Despite the appearance of permanence and stability, from the historical point of view the Berlin Wall proved to be not much more durable than the nylon structure of Christo and Jeanne Claude.

Running Fence became one of the key works that invited other artists to interact with environments in a sustainable way, and consider natural landscapes as already existing artistic expressions. Over time, it also developed new political connotations regardless of the artists’ involvement. In 2016, after the first presidential victory of Donald Trump and his announcement of plans to build a wall separating the US from Mexico, conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer published a petition addressed to the president. He proposed to commission Christo with the creation of the new Running Fence version, turning “a racist project into a public art event.”

Adolf Hitler considered himself a man of culture. However, his taste in art was narrow, rigid, and ideologically driven. He believed that art should serve the state, glorify the Aryan race, and reflect only moral and racial purity. Anything that deviated from realism, did not glorify the human figure in heroic ways, or was created by Jewish or politically opposed to Nazism artists, was considered degenerate, corrupt, and dangerous.

Adolf Hitler’s Disdain for Modern Art

Hitler’s personal disdain for modernist and avant-garde art grew from his own frustrations. Before politics, he had tried to become a painter, applying unsuccessfully to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He favored classical forms, technical precision, and clear representation, and he judged all other styles as morally and culturally inferior. This personal bias became state policy after 1933, when the Nazis systematically suppressed art they considered subversive.

In 1937, the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition took place in Munich. The Nazis had confiscated thousands of artworks from museums across Germany. In the exhibition, nearly 650 were all displayed cramped up, almost one onto the other, in order to condemn modern art as something that represented the decline of society and morality. It mocked movements such as Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism, among others. The artists included in the exhibition were humiliated, vilified, and lost any sort of recognition within the German state. Some were even forced into exile. Entartete Kunst had another goal, though: to warn the German citizens that art should match the Nazi ideals. Otherwise, it would be doomed.

The works of the following ten artists represent the range of creativity that Hitler despised the most. Each of these artists challenged his vision of art in its own way, whether through abstraction, emotional intensity, political engagement, or the exploration of human vulnerability.

1. Pablo Picasso

One of the artists Hitler hated the most was Pablo Picasso. The Spanish artist was one of the pillars of Cubism and he had revolutionary ideals. Cubism broke any ties with traditional art and figurative representation. It transformed forms into geometric shapes and showed multiple perspectives of an object or a person at the same time. One of his paintings that the Nazis hated was Guernica (1937). It depicted the bombing of the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. The chaotic composition, the disjointed human figures, and, of course, the harsh criticism of the political regime went in the exact opposite direction of the heroic and Aryan ideals that Hitler stood for. Naturally, the entire work by Picasso was condemned by the Nazis as corrupted and obscure.

The pamphlets that accompanied the Entartete Kunst exhibition wrote that Cubism was a symptom of society’s decay. Hitler valued order and a clear, realistic representation. He and Nazi cultural officials repeatedly framed Cubism and many modern movements as degenerate, claiming they reflected moral or mental decay and warning they could negatively influence the public. Picasso’s political engagement and international stature made him particularly symbolic to Nazi critics; his works were among those confiscated and ridiculed in the campaign. Specifically, the Nazi regime believed that through his influence, Picasso could legitimize modernism abroad and weaken Germany’s “higher” cultural ideals. They feared that widespread admiration for his visual experimentation would undermine their campaign to restore academic realism, which they believed essential to national regeneration.

2. Vincent van Gogh

Although Vincent van Gogh died decades before the Nazi era, his bold, emotionally charged canvases were singled out as symptomatic of the “degenerate” aesthetic the regime loathed. Van Gogh’s surfaces carry the artist’s hand: thick impasto, visible, agitated strokes, and jagged lines that communicate psychic intensity. Colors are unstable and expressive rather than descriptive. For Hitler, an admirer of measured draftsmanship and clear representation, Van Gogh’s visible struggle with form and color read as instability or moral pathology rather than innovation.

The criticism was about both his technique and his subjects. Van Gogh painted scenes of daily life, peasants, and poverty. All these clashed with Hitler’s propaganda. Several publications and the exhibition text framed his work as symptomatic of mental weakness and cultural decline. Thus, he was setting an example that needed to be avoided. The visible elements of his distress, vulnerability, and inner turmoil made him repulsive to the Nazis. Van Gogh was too messy and intimate to serve their heroic narratives. Furthermore, the Nazis found that his emotional and mental fragility were a psychological danger to the public, claiming that his paintings could awaken similar feelings and thoughts. His personal biography was misused as propaganda to argue that creative instability produced cultural degeneration.

3. Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall’s paintings, saturated with folkloric memory, floating figures, and dreamlike juxtapositions, ran headlong into the Nazi worldview. Chagall’s art did not prioritize nationalist heroics; it celebrated fragile, private worlds, Jewish cultural markers, and a tender, at times surreal, humanism. For Hitler’s cultural censors, that combination was doubly offensive: it was explicitly “foreign” and explicitly Jewish, two categories the regime equated with subversion.

Chagall’s works were seized and displayed in Entartete Kunst under captions that mocked their lack of realism and alleged moral vagueness. Nazi materials framed the dream imagery as evidence of cultural decadence and racial otherness. The whimsical figures and floating lovers meant something deeply human to viewers who knew his cultural references; to Nazi ideologues, those same qualities signaled rootlessness and spiritual corruption. Chagall’s persecution illustrates how Nazi aesthetics were inseparable from racial policy; content that expressed Jewish life or diasporic memory was treated not merely as an aesthetic threat but as a target of ethnic exclusion. His frequent depiction of village life, musicians, and religious symbols was portrayed by Nazi commentators as a reminder of the cultural pluralism they sought to erase, intensifying their determination to suppress his work from German public consciousness.

4. Paul Klee

Paul Klee’s deceptively spare, symbolic paintings challenged the Nazis not through shock but through elusiveness. Klee worked with simplified signs, cryptic glyphs, and subtle color relations that read like a private visual language. His works showing  animals, masks, and playful mechanistic forms asked for interpretation rather than supplying an obvious didactic message. That interpretive openness was intolerable to Hitler’s cultural program, which sought immediate, legible visual instruction.

Klee also had institutional influence; he taught and shaped younger artists’ thinking about abstraction and form. The Nazi leadership feared this pedagogical reach. In the Entartete Kunst show and its press, Klee’s pieces were presented as evidence of artistic decay and incomprehension. Critics charged that his “childlike” forms and symbolic ambiguity undermined the national moral project. Hitler’s hostility to Klee thus combined aesthetic distaste with anxiety about cultural transmission: a teacher who normalized ambiguity threatened the regime’s control of narrative and taste. Moreover, Klee’s blending of scientific diagrams, musical structure, and poetic metaphor was depicted as intellectual elitism, something the regime condemned as inaccessible to the “healthy German.” His refusal to create straightforward allegories made him a direct ideological obstacle.

5. Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky was particularly repulsive to the Nazis. The artist was deeply intellectual and wrote about the spirituality of art and how it was not associated with representation. This philosophy was a direct hit to the Nazi insecurities. Hitler favored only art with would support his political regime; art that would be inspiring and supportive of his nationalist virtues. Kandinsky’s inward, spiritual aims were fundamentally at odds with that.

Abstract art was another genre condemned by the Nazi regime. Kandinsky was one of the genre’s pillars, so consequently, his art was heavily criticized for promoting social decay. Moreover, there wasn’t any figuration explanatory of his work, making it even harder for the Nazis to understand; not that they wished to, it made it easier for them to label the paintings as signs of moral chaos. Officials used such artworks to, in their own way, prove that modern art could destabilize social cohesion.

Beyond mere dislike, Hitler’s apparatus framed Kandinsky’s work as a symptom to be remedied; a cultural ailment to be removed from public institutions and replaced with art that served state narratives. Kandinsky’s associations with the Bauhaus further deepened Nazi hostility, as the school was already targeted for promoting internationalism and experimental thought. His color theories were condemned as mystical nonsense unfit for a disciplined, collectivist society.

6. Otto Dix

Otto Dix provoked Hitler’s wrath because Dix refused to flatter. His visual vocabulary—raw, clinical, often grotesque—confronted viewers with the physical and moral wreckage of modern life. Dix’s experience as a soldier informed canvases that showed maimed bodies, trench mud, sex work, and the social wounds of the postwar period. In Hitler’s schema, art should make citizens proud, not force them to look at humiliation and human frailty.

Dix’s pieces were loudly denounced in Nazi propaganda as proof of cultural degeneration. The Entartete Kunst texts singled out his realism as ugly and corrosive, while regime curators physically removed his paintings from museums. Hitler’s problem with Dix was not mere taste: he feared the social effect. If art made people aware of suffering, doubt, or moral complexity, it threatened the neat heroic story the regime needed. For that reason, Dix’s empathy and forensic honesty made him a target for persecution. His war triptychs, which exposed the cost of conflict in unvarnished detail, were seen as especially dangerous to a government dependent on militaristic pride. Dix’s refusal to mythologize Germany’s past made him a permanent ideological enemy.

7. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Expressionist canvases show modern nervousness: urban crowds, stylized nudes, and jolting color that conveyed anxiety and dislocation. His figures are often angular and taut, as if the modern city were reshaping the human body. To Hitler and his cultural apparatus, those distortions were signs of decay; not psychological nuance but moral and physical deterioration.

Kirchner’s work was seized and publicly lampooned: critics accused Expressionism of attacking traditional beauty and of encouraging social disorder. The rhetoric around Kirchner often veered into the personal, painting his art as symptomatic of a broader cultural collapse. Beyond the art, the campaign affected Kirchner’s life: public censure, shrinking exhibition opportunities, and the knowledge that one’s work was being used as evidence of a supposed national crisis. For the Nazi project, the artist’s emotional honesty and urban critique were intolerable. His association with Die Brücke, a group already linked to left-leaning cultural reform, intensified official suspicion, and Nazi critics frequently used Kirchner as an example of “sick modernity” when arguing for purges in museum collections.

8. Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann’s paintings are dense with symbolic tableaux, theatrical poses, and uneasy compositions. These are visual narratives that resist simple interpretation. He painted scene after scene of social ritual gone awry: processions, interiors, figures whose faces seem to hide moral ambiguity. Beckmann refused to create easy, inspiring myths; instead, he presented society as complex, sometimes menacing, and morally ambiguous.

Hitler’s cultural critics branded Beckmann’s ambiguity and psychological intensity as corrosive. The Entartete Kunst exhibition used his work to argue that modern art made public taste decadent. Officials treated his grotesqueness as a moral failing rather than an artistic exploration. Beckmann’s treatment under the Nazis reveals a key fear: any art that complicates the viewer’s moral response, or suggests frailty beneath civic facades, undermines the neat, edifying narratives authoritarian regimes want to tell. His layered religious references and cryptic symbolism were cited as elitist and “anti-German,” and several of his major works were paraded as examples of cultural sabotage in Nazi cultural journals.

9. Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt’s gilded surfaces and erotic, ornamental paintings confronted Nazi moralism with sensuality. Klimt foregrounded the body and desire in tableaux rich with pattern and intimacy. The Nazis judged such frank eroticism as moral laxity, especially dangerous because Klimt’s bourgeois patrons made his taste visible to the cultural elite.

The accusations against Klimt were framed in moral terms (corrupting sensibility, undermining discipline) but they were also political: an art that celebrated private passion on lavish, public stages did not reinforce nationalist stoicism. Nazi officials removed Klimt’s works from public collections and deployed them in Entartete Kunst to contrast “degenerate” sensuality with the austere, supposedly wholesome ideal they promoted.

The attack on Klimt’s art showed how eroticism and decorative richness were seen as threatening to the “purified” version of culture. His interest in powerful female figures was considered destabilizing for the traditional gender roles that Nazism stood for. Klimt’s depictions of female mythological characters, such as Judith or Danae, were seen through the prism of the celebration of female autonomy and sexual freedom. This kind of imagery came into conflict with the Nazi ideal woman, who self-sacrificed herself to Volk and motherhood.

10. Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele is known for his distorted figures and overt eroticism. As seen with the aforementioned artists, this was not acceptable in the Nazi art doctrine. While the painter pursued psychological exposure and vulnerability, the Nazis condemned such erotic content and the slightest sample of weakness. Such things were so far away from perfection, and the “superhuman” Hitler stood for.

Schiele’s work was prominently featured in Entartete Kunst materials as examples of sexual decadence and national contamination. The public framing presented him as evidence that modern culture had lost moral bearings. Again, the denunciation combined prudishness with political motive: art that dissected inner life and displayed bodily particularity undermined the regime’s ideal of a unified, healthy national body. Schiele’s raw honesty, therefore, made his art a target not merely of taste but of political suppression. His stark self-portraits were highlighted by Nazi commentators as pathological, and his exploration of sexuality outside marital norms was portrayed as a direct affront to racial and moral discipline.

Adolf Hitler and the Limits of Artistic Control

The artists Hitler despised provide a map of what his regime feared: inwardness, ambiguity, bodily vulnerability, political critique, spiritual inquiry, and cultural diversity. The attack on modern art was, thus, deliberate; it did not align with the regime’s propaganda. All the confiscations, the staged mockeries, and even the schoolroom purges had one goal: to replace art that promoted critical thinking and political and social critique with simple, heroic images that instructed obedience and pride.

His personal frustrations, combined with institutional power, produced a campaign that humiliated artists, emptied museums, and attempted to cleanse public life of certain modes of seeing. But even framed only through his hatred and attempts at control, these artists’ diversity demonstrates why Hitler’s program had to be so aggressively repressive: the forms he targeted were powerful precisely because they invited thought, feeling, and dissent. That, ultimately, was what he feared most.

Before her rediscovery by feminist literary critics in the 1970s, Elizabeth Gaskell was not as highly thought of as male contemporaries who wrote in a similar genre and style, such as Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. Invariably known as Mrs Gaskell as if to dismiss her work as the jottings of a housewife, she was discussed much like her predecessor Jane Austen, as a writer of sentimental novels about relationships between men and women. But this tells only half the story, neglecting how Gaskell thought of the novel, especially social realism, as a vehicle for real political change.

Elizabeth Gaskell & Unitarianism in England

Two parts of Elizabeth Gaskell‘s background are especially important: firstly, that she was born into, then married into, a fervently Unitarian household, and secondly, that she lived in Manchester.

Gaskell was born in 1810, the daughter of a Unitarian minister, William Stevenson. She was raised by relatives in northwest England, where Unitarianism thrived, including in prominent families such as the Wedgwoods and the Darwins. When she was 21, she married William Gaskell, who was also a Unitarian minister.

In the days before Parliament decreed to extend legal rights to those of all religions, being a Unitarian meant subscribing to a nonconformist way of life, not just a set of beliefs. Its crucial divergence from the established faith of the Church of England lay in its rejection of belief in the Trinity. Unitarians believe in the historical existence of Jesus Christ as redeemer of mankind, but in God alone as creator of the universe.

Because of this, Unitarians were unable to attend Oxford or Cambridge, where all students were required to affirm the Thirty-Nine Articles in line with Anglican doctrine. In earlier centuries, this exclusion would have been a significant hindrance for any men wishing to enter ‘traditional’ professions, such as law and medicine. Women, regardless of faith, were unable to attend the universities at this time anyway.

By the early 19th century, however, Unitarians were attending other universities around the country and setting up institutions for the growing numbers in their community, founded on their principles, which prized education and charity.

Victorian Unitarians believed in extending access to education, along both class and gender lines. At a time when around two-thirds of men and only half of women were literate (Lemire 2013, 249), Unitarians like William and Elizabeth Gaskell firmly believed in teaching children to read and write, thus giving them access to a better life.

In addition to supporting the Unitarian community at Cross Street Chapel, where William Gaskell preached, the couple undertook outreach work. This involved teaching and lecturing, but also collecting charitable subscriptions and alleviating people’s suffering during outbreaks of cholera and typhus. The hardest-hit communities in these epidemics were the poor, especially in the Gaskells’ home city of Manchester.

Victorian Manchester

Several of Gaskell’s novels are set in Manchester or a fictionalized version of the city. Around 1800, Manchester’s population was about 4,000, but within just a few decades, and by the time Gaskell was living there, this figure had jumped to 400,000. The city’s growth was fueled by its industries, especially its cotton mills. One writer in Charles Dickens‘s periodical Household Words, where Gaskell would publish many of her stories, referred to Manchester in 1854 by its common nickname, Cottonopolis. At this point, there were 108 cotton mills in the city.

As many eminent visitors to the newly famous city remarked, Manchester’s booming industry had various negative side effects, some more immediately noticeable than others. They remarked on its dark, smoky skies, its thick and cloying air, and the omnipresent clatter of machinery. Nearby Salford, now part of Greater Manchester, was similarly buoyed by its factories in the 19th century, giving the place an atmosphere that Ewan MacColl would later capture in the song Dirty Old Town (written in 1949).

If you could see through the smog, as Friedrich Engels tried to do during his stay between 1842 and 1844, you might notice too the vast disparities in living conditions produced by the city’s rapid onward march. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (first published in German in 1845), Engels explained the detrimental effect of the Industrial Revolution on working people.

Whatever capitalists might claim about these machines representing progress, city-dwellers, especially in Manchester, were dying in higher numbers than before, crammed into close, unsuitable housing, which in many areas amounted to slums, where diseases spread quickly. To lose at least one child was a common occurrence for families, whether to illness or starvation, since low wages and an increasingly uneven distribution of wealth meant that many families struggled to support themselves.

All of the conditions that Engels described found their way into Gaskell’s writing. Her first novel was published just a few years after Engels’s book, in 1848, and arose from her own experience of losing a child.

Her son, William, died in 1845, aged just nine months, and Elizabeth and her husband discussed the possibility that writing might help with her grief. As it turned out, Gaskell’s firsthand knowledge of losing a child equipped her to write about it with deep sympathy in this first novel, Mary Barton, which is full of the prevalent loss and grief faced by ordinary families in Manchester at this time.

Gaskell was not of the same class as Mary Barton and many of the families she wrote about, but she had strong connections with working people through the work she and her husband undertook around Manchester. This also meant she was able to fill the book with authentic dialect words and snatches of local poetry and song, which she used as epigraphs for the novel’s chapters.

Mary Barton is about the disparity between mill owners and mill workers. There are industrial strikes early in the novel, and these tensions result in a mill owner’s son being murdered, which became the catalyst for the more sensational parts of the plot later in the novel.

Gaskell’s narration shows sympathy for both sides, drawing parallels between the family who loses their child to poverty and the wealthy family who loses their child to murder. Indeed, she believed in the realist novel’s capacity to foster understanding between people of different backgrounds. This did not mean, though, that she would shy away from depicting working-class living conditions in all their horror, just as Engels had.

Contemporary Controversies

From the way critics well into the 20th century wrote about “Mrs Gaskell,” or perhaps from her reputation as the author of works which formed the basis for the BBC period drama Cranford—set in a countryside village and replete with ladies in bonnets—it might be surprising to learn that Elizabeth Gaskell’s early writing caused controversy.

Mary Barton was published in 1848, and while Britain did not witness the kinds of uprisings which took place on the Continent that year, commentators in the British press were still keenly conscious of the issue at the core of these revolutions: democracy and the rights of working people.

Chartism was at its height at this time, a movement that called for extending the vote to all men over 21 years old and for a more egalitarian system of government that represented the needs of everyone in society. Mary Barton spoke directly to these ideas, despite its plot ultimately leaning towards sensationalism and revolving around the heroine’s desperate quest to exonerate her lover from the false charge of murder.

Gaskell had originally wanted to call the novel John Barton, focusing on the heroine’s father, a mill worker and trade union man who is increasingly worn down (physically and spiritually) by the struggle to alleviate the woes of his family and those around him. Had the novel been this more unstinting portrait of the plight of an ordinary man, its political impetus might have been more obvious.

But even so, the novel struck contemporary reviewers as contentious, unfairly biased against the oppressive mill owners. Gaskell’s refusal to shy away from the realities of working-class life—from minor things, such as the inclusion of dialect, which some readers may not have understood, to major ones, such as the scenes of infant death—was too much for some.

Mary Barton had been published anonymously, so these critiques were not directly aimed at Gaskell. But when her next novel, Ruth, came out in 1853, it was identified as being “by the author of Mary Barton,” and some readers who had begun to suspect that this was Gaskell were scandalized. Taking up one of the subplots of Mary Barton, which dealt with an aunt of Mary’s who had been outcast and was forced to turn to sex work, Ruth also reveals the hardships of working-class women, and their dependence on exploitative men.

The eponymous heroine of Ruth works in the Victorian equivalent of a modern-day sweatshop. She is seduced by a man who represents the promise of social elevation and a better life, falls pregnant out of wedlock, and is abandoned. Importantly, Ruth is assisted by a nonconformist minister, and in a further reflection of Gaskell’s Unitarian views, Ruth herself is devoted to acts of charity, eventually working as a nurse in a poor community, where she fatally contracts typhus.

Despite this clearly moralizing outcome to the plot, Ruth was nonetheless controversial for even daring to portray what contemporaries called a fallen woman. Even Gaskell’s friends were unhappy about it, and reportedly some readers burned their copies. Gaskell’s subsequent novels were less controversial, but she continued to address the same social themes in the same bluntly realist style.

North and South & the Values of Social Realism

Like other realist novelists of her time, Gaskell tended to employ omniscient narration, telling events in the third person and moving freely between the thoughts and feelings of a wide cast of characters. One characteristic of Victorian realist writing is the occasional switch into first person as the narrator interjects and reflects on the story they are telling. Gaskell sometimes used these interjections to prove what she saw as the value of social realism.

In Mary Barton, the narrator breaks off while describing John Barton’s reflections as he walks through a crowd, and asks the reader: “did you ever think where all the thousands of people you daily meet are bound?” We cannot know, the narrator encourages us to reflect, “the wild romances of their lives; the trials, the temptations they are even now enduring, resisting, sinking under.”

The moment is a nice analogy for the intent of social realist novels, focusing the reader’s attention, even for a short while, on one of these unknown passersby in a crowd and revealing their romances, trials, and temptations.

Gaskell’s narratorial interjections indicate that she anticipates her readership to be middle-class like herself, and reveal an intention to make this readership understand and sympathize with working-class characters. In Mary Barton and North and South (serialized in Dickens’s magazine Household Words between 1854 and 1855), Gaskell depicts characters from working- and middle-class backgrounds as having essentially the same humanity, even though their surroundings, as she meticulously describes, are very different.

North and South is, in some ways, a more sympathetic representation of middle-class mill owners than Mary Barton. Its heroine, Margaret Hale, is not working-class like Mary Barton but a middle-class girl from southern England who is forced to move north to a fictional town based on Gaskell’s native Manchester. The novel is full of binaries like the one in its title. Margaret experiences the conflicts between rich and poor, employer and employee, and man and woman. The romantic plot is woven in with Margaret’s attempt to make the mill owner, John Thornton, a more lenient and generous employer.

Gaskell felt that novels, with their opportunities to dive into a character’s psyche and to develop plots which move through crises to resolutions, were uniquely fitted (in contrast, say, to journalism) to address social problems. Add to this that novels were increasingly widely read in the mid-19th century, and the emphasis that Gaskell, as a Unitarian, placed on reading as a means for self-improvement and a guide to social conduct.

In other words, Gaskell hoped that her readers would be moved not only to change their hearts and minds, but to take real action, after encountering the arguments of trade unionists in Mary Barton and North and South, or the abject living conditions of the poor, or the struggle of her heroines to make their voices heard.

Elizabeth Gaskell, the Political Writer

Following 1970s feminist literary criticism, Elizabeth Gaskell’s ability to integrate political ideas into apparently domestic tales of romance is appreciated as a demonstration of the argument that the personal is political. Why did Gaskell’s reputation languish for a whole century after her death, before this appreciation?

Many of Gaskell’s male contemporaries produced realist novels that combined social commentary with romance plots. Charles Dickens is the best known, but Anthony Trollope and Benjamin Disraeli (the future English Prime Minister) also wrote novels which depicted a cast of characters in a domestic setting and, then, the wider context in which they lived, thus dramatizing the effect of social conditions on ordinary people and their relationships.

There is certainly an argument that gender is the reason these male writers have been credited for the political content of their work, while Gaskell’s political side has been overlooked. It is also true that Gaskell, when not employing a highly realist style to describe (for example) the interior of a working family’s house, took up a sentimental style which had gone out of fashion even later in the Victorian period, with heroines often fainting and weeping profusely.

Moreover, Gaskell may have been primarily remembered as a romance novelist rather than a political novelist because politics are so changeable and linked to the specifics of time and place, while the human feelings of romantic novels are perennial. Readers picking up Gaskell’s novels after the Victorian period may not have related to the intricacies of employer-employee relations in the 1840s. On the other hand, they could connect with the “enemies to lovers” arc of Margaret Hale and John Thornton (not dissimilar to that of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy in Jane Austen‘s Pride and Prejudice).

However, Gaskell proves that novelists who focus on sentiment, the home, and women should not be dismissed as apolitical. Informed by her Unitarian beliefs, Gaskell sought to show the importance of the domestic realm in shaping the political sphere, as well as vice versa, with the conditions in which characters live directly informing how they move through the world.

She made a case for literacy in a rapidly industrializing era, arguing that novels could be used both to educate and to instill a sympathetic perspective. Her novels do not offer perfect solutions to the social problems they depict. However, they stand as valuable historical sources and testaments to the Victorian faith in the power of reading as a call to action.

Sources

• Gaskell, E. (2000). Mary Barton.
• Lemire, D. (2013). ‘A Historiographical Survey of Literacy in Britain between 1780 and 1830’. Constellations (University of Alberta Student Journal) 4 (1).

Like Charles Dickens and London, or the Brontës and Yorkshire, Thomas Hardy is one of those authors who is indelibly associated with a place: Wessex, the area of south-west England he memorialized in his novels. Hardy remains one of the best-loved authors in English literature. His elegiac treatment of country life has become woven into English history, despite his frank approach to some topics which shocked readers at the time and can still do so today.

Hardy’s Beginnings

Although Wessex, the setting for most of Thomas Hardy’s novels and short stories, covered a vast swathe of southwest England, Hardy is particularly associated with the county of Dorset, where he was born in 1840.

At this time, such a rural area would have felt worlds away from the rapidly industrializing city centers of London and Manchester. As a boy, Hardy walked several miles a day to go to school in Dorchester, and his family lived in a thatched cottage on the edge of a vast heath. The local community was tight-knit, with a strong oral culture, where people mostly congregated around village pubs and churches.

Hardy learned to read at a young age and was interested in pursuing a career as a writer, preferably a poet. At mid-century, poetry could still have been considered a dominant form of literary production, just as widely read as novels, although the three-volume novel was rising in popularity and would prove far more lucrative for authors. However, since Hardy came from a humble background, pursuing any kind of literary career was risky, so he looked into a couple of alternative options.

First, Hardy thought of entering the church. He had been interested in ecclesiastical life from a young age, especially religious music. He had been taught the violin by his father, who played in the local parish music group. Church and village music-making would feature in a few of his novels, most prominently in Under the Greenwood Tree, published in 1872.

Hardy’s family, however, urged him towards architecture, and he worked for several years as an apprentice to an architect whose work involved a lot of church restoration. This work also influenced Hardy’s writing. He felt that much of this “restoration” was actually about destroying old monuments, and his novels are suffused with an idea of what country villages might once have been like. Hardy’s architectural career continued into his twenties, including a stint at a firm in London. However, by now, he was also devoting himself to writing novels.

What – And Where – Was Wessex?

In a preface to Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), his fourth novel and his first major success, Hardy writes about his invention of an area called Wessex. Drawing on his upbringing, he wanted to write a series of novels with the same countryside setting. He did not want to confine himself just to his native Dorset, though, nor did he want to completely invent somewhere loosely based on this county. So, he landed on an approach halfway between realism and fantasy. Looking to “the pages of early English history,” he took the name of an “extinct kingdom,” Wessex, and transplanted it to Victorian England.

Wessex, in Hardy’s fiction, extends as far as Plymouth to the southwest, and to the northeast, Christminster, his fictionalized name for Oxford in Jude the Obscure (1895). It is a modern land, with “railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches [mass-produced matches in boxes], labourers who could read and write, and National school children.” At the same time, its olden-time name grants it a feeling of pre-industrial simplicity and distinguishes it from any real locations Hardy might have used as inspiration.

What Hardy referred to as a “merely realistic dream-country” became, through his fiction, as real to readers as the actual towns and villages of southwest England. Thanks to his rendering of country life in his novels, readers could refer to typical “Wessex peasants” or “Wessex customs.”

From Far From the Madding Crowd onwards (although Under the Greenwood Tree, a couple of years earlier, had been set in a yet unnamed Wessex), Hardy’s novels portrayed characters from humble backgrounds working in rural professions. There is a reddleman in 1878’s The Return of the Native (‘reddle’ is a dialect word for red ocher, which reddlemen would supply to farmers to mark their sheep). The Trumpet-Major (1880) focuses on a soldier in a local regiment during the Napoleonic Wars. The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) begins in the mercantile context of a country fair, with its protagonist rising through the ranks to become mayor.

Generations of readers have been drawn to Hardy’s novels because of this combination of imagined and real geography. Like George Eliot‘s evocations of the Midlands in Silas Marner (1861) and Middlemarch (1871), we get a sense of encountering characters, speech, places, customs, traditions, and ways of life which might once have existed before the Industrial Revolution wrought its changes. The fact that both Eliot and Hardy invented names for their countryside locations captures the fact that this history is half-imagined, and its blend of the illusory and the factual makes it all the more alluring.

Thomas Hardy the Poet

For almost the entire Victorian period, Hardy was known as a novelist. Far from the Madding Crowd had brought him a wide readership, which was cemented by The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge. The controversial Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895) strengthened his reputation as one of the more challenging novelists of his day.

But Hardy had never stopped writing poems, and in 1898, once he had secured a steady income from writing serialized novels, he brought out his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems and Other Verses. Like his novels and the short story collection Wessex Tales (1888), these were largely set in his imagined rural terrain, but the poems were not as well-received as Hardy’s prose.

In Wessex Poems and half a dozen other collections published before his death in 1928, Hardy covered a range of subjects and themes. Sometimes his poems are drily humorous, although his reputation as a pessimist is well-deserved, with poems that range from introspective to moody to bleak. He often covered topical subjects such as war. The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) is the context for the subdued irony of The Man He Killed (1902), and he lived long enough to qualify as a First World War poet with several of the verses in Moments of Vision (1917). The Convergence of the Twain (1912) was a response to the sinking of the Titanic and reflects on the futility of materialistic ambitions in the face of natural forces.

Hardy also wrote touching poems on family, aging, and death. He Never Expected Much (1928), written at the very end of his life, muses on how to sum up a life which, now he comes to think of it, has been far more mundane than he would have liked to think it would be, back at the beginning. To My Father’s Violin (1916) looks at Hardy’s late father through the lens of his now silent instrument, with the idea that the violin “must do without you now,” and that the instrument and player will never again be united, becoming an elegant way of expressing his own grief and loss.

Early experiences in architecture and fascination with churches also found their way into Hardy’s poetry. Poems such as The Church-Builder, The Abbey Mason, and The Levelled Churchyard are as revealing as Hardy’s fiction, if not more, regarding his feelings on organized religion, community, and the preservation of village life.

The Levelled Churchyard, spoken in the voices of ghosts issuing from disturbed graves, was prompted by a memory from his time as an architect in the 1860s, of removing the graves at Old St. Pancras Churchyard to a new plot to make way for a railway line. In a twist of literary fate, Hardy would have had to exhume fellow authors Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, both buried there, had their bodies not already been moved to Bournemouth in 1851, to lie beside their daughter, Mary Shelley.

A great portion of Hardy’s poetry was romantic, inspired by various women, including (but not limited to) his first wife, Emma, and his second wife, Florence. Neutral Tones, published in 1898 but dating back to 1867, is a melancholy meditation on the end of a relationship. At the time the poem was published, Hardy had been married to Emma for 25 years. However, their relationship was strained by the pressures of Hardy’s career (an often solitary and stress-inducing pursuit) and their living circumstances. The latter involved moving between isolating rural existence and brief spells in London for the “season,” where Emma felt judged and out of place.

By 1910, the Hardys were living at Max Gate, Dorchester, in a kind of ménage à trois with Florence Dugdale, almost 40 years their junior, and a friend and amanuensis to both, thanks to her skills as a typist and reader. Hardy’s poems from this period feature both women. When Emma died in 1912, he wrote a sequence of elegies eventually published as Poems 1912-1913. Although prompted by grief, the poems are, like all of Hardy’s writing about relationships between men and women, honest about difficulties, imperfections, and regrets.

Hardy’s Heroines

In addition to inspiring some of his best poems, Hardy’s wife, Emma, was the partial inspiration for his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). The novel is notable for giving rise to the term “cliffhanger.” In its serialized version, one of the installments ended with a character literally dangling from a cliff.

A Pair of Blue Eyes is also notable because it draws on the early days of Hardy’s relationship with Emma to create a dynamic that recurs throughout his fiction, in which a heroine (usually beautiful, charming, and well-meaning) is caught between multiple suitors of differing social status. Elfride Swancourt in A Pair of Blue Eyes must decide, as Emma had when Hardy was courting her, whether to risk condemnation by marrying the socially inferior man she loves.

Far From the Madding Crowd features a similar quandary, with Bathsheba Everdene having to choose between a soldier, a prosperous farmer, and a more humble shepherd. The Return of the Native splits the male characters’ interest between two contrasting heroines: the naive Thomasin Yeobright and the beautiful, adventurous Eustacia Vye, whose attitude towards sexual relationships makes her what Victorians called a “fallen woman.” Hardy had taken up a similar theme in the poem The Ruined Maid, published in 1901 but written in 1866, which satirizes the hypocritical attitudes of society towards women who had intimate relations outside marriage.

The plot of The Mayor of Casterbridge, too, is instigated by an event which reveals Hardy’s interest in women’s status and agency: a frustrated and drunken man auctions off his wife and their baby daughter at a country fair. Wife-selling was a surprisingly widespread custom, especially in rural communities where divorce was too costly an option for ending an unhappy marriage. Although it was on the decline by the 19th century, it was not unheard of.

Hardy’s best-known novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, both have questions of women’s desires, agency, and purity (whether socially or morally defined) at their center. Tess is subtitled A Pure Woman, and contrasts the treatment received by women and men who have extramarital relations. Alec D’Urberville and Angel Clare, despite differing wildly in their kindness towards Tess, are similar in that they have affairs outside marriage and are not judged. Tess, on the other hand, is plagued by miserable consequences after she is seduced by Alec.

Jude the Obscure was similarly unflinching about behaviors not often represented in Victorian fiction. It features extramarital affairs, divorce, bigamy, and children born (and miscarried) out of wedlock. Its heroines, Arabella Don and Sue Bridehead, are again contrasting, particularly in their attitudes to sex.

All this frankness was bound up with the novel’s ambivalent representation of faith and religion, with questions raised over the social role of the church as an institution and how belief in the divine informs behavior. For this reason, the novel shocked readers, with reviews referring to “Jude the Obscene” and “Hardy the Degenerate” (Millgate 2006). Yet Hardy was a precursor to many 20th-century novelists (D.H. Lawrence, for instance, was a keen reader of Hardy) who placed the desires of both men and women at the center of their fiction, regardless of the ire they might attract.

Thomas Hardy’s Literary Legacy

When Thomas Hardy died in 1928, the only reason there were questions raised over his burial in Westminster Abbey was that he had been a fairly vocal agnostic. In terms of literary merit, there was no question. Over the course of his 88 years, Hardy had bestowed something incomparable upon British culture. Even if he had been a little daring in the way he presented women’s desires and suffering at the hands of men, he had woven himself into the fabric of the nation with his elegiac yet realistic landscapes of Wessex.

In fact, not all of Hardy was buried in Westminster Abbey. Before his body was cremated, his heart was removed and laid to rest in his native Dorset. This was a fitting conclusion to a life full of contrasts between the countryside and the city, contrasts that seeped into his fiction. His acute observation of class, which shaped the love triangles and courtship plots of several of the novels, came about because Hardy experienced society in various towns and villages across Wessex, as well as high society in London.

Hardy’s lasting reputation rests on the enduring appeal of novels like Tess, with its dramatic plot and its bucolic setting which seems just out of reach for the modern reader, as it did to the Victorians.

Hardy also remains compelling because he is a transitional figure, a product of the Victorian era who lived to see the first flowerings of modernism. Beloved as a novelist by Victorian audiences, he was not appreciated as a poet until the 20th century, when he published no more novels but several poetry collections.

Both his fiction and poetry, in fact, are preoccupied with this very question of how places and people change (or hardly change at all) when we move from one era to another. From his memorialization of countryside customs and church architecture to his scrutiny of the position of women, Hardy recognized that he lived through a period of constant flux, and turned to literature to explore what that meant for human nature and society.

Sources

• Hardy, Thomas (1994). Far from the Madding Crowd
• Millgate, Michael (2006). ‘Hardy, Thomas (1840–1928), novelist and poet.’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The unique appearance of pixel art brings many adults back to the “golden age” of arcade games, when games like Frogger, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man dominated the arcade screens. Today, video game developers have advanced far beyond the need for low-resolution graphics, but pixel art remains a vibrant, nostalgic medium for many artists. Many popular indie games, such as Stardew Valley and Undertale, have embraced pixel art as part of their game’s charm, and many professional artists use the medium to create stunning works of their own.

What Is a Pixel?

A pixel, which comes from the term “picture element,” refers to a single, basic unit of programmable color that is seen on a computer display or digital image. Every graphic element on a screen—pictures, text, and otherwise—is made of thousands of pixels. Each pixel is a singular dot of color; the number of pixels per inch (PPI) determines the resolution, or “quality,” of an image. A higher number of pixels creates a sharper, cleaner image. A lower number of pixels means the image may appear “blocky” or mosaic-like, the defining feature in the pixel art style.

In 1927, a new program called “Television Demonstration in America” first used the term “picture element” to describe the quality of an image on a screen. “Pixel” as a term wouldn’t come along until 1965 when scientist Fred Billingsley used it in his 1965 paper “Digital Video Processing at JPL.”

After 1970, when an IBM internal report also used the term, the pixel exploded in popularity, appearing in journals published everywhere from Stanford to UC Davis. However, the first color pixels were invented by NASA in the late 1960s, when they worked in conjunction with the New York Institute of Technology to create an advanced computer lab, where they developed the first RGB-colored pixels.

What Is Pixel Art?

As the name suggests, pixel art is made up of “pixels.” Some images aim to use as few blocks as possible to convey their images, while others create complex scenery with thousands of tiny squares. This creates a unique visual, similar to mosaics, cross-stitch, or other types of embroidery.

However, pixel art has a great deal of variety; as a result of the power of modern graphic cards, artists are no longer limited by small, low-resolution screens. Pixel art is usually created using a square grid, which artists fill with different colors to create an image. Although it is most popular among the digital art community, the blocky, mosaic-like qualities of pixel art have been re-created in many different mediums. It is not uncommon to see pixel-esque signs in front of places like arcades or trendy cafes.

Pixel art was originally created by artists who were working around the restriction of cathode ray tube (CRT) screens. CRT screens had lower resolution and were usually similar in height and width, meaning they had a very limited graphics output.

Eventually, LED TVs replaced CRTs, but the pixel art created for early games simply did not look the same. This is largely because CRT televisions have a slight flicker on the screen. As a result, the jagged edges of color in pixel art blur, creating a smoother, more dimensional image. Because modern screens have a larger resolution, they have to upscale the image, making it appear “blocky” and sometimes unappealing.

8-Bit Art and the First Video Game Consoles

Tennis for Two was a two-player game created by physicist William Higinbotham in 1958 and is widely considered the first “true” video game. However, it was not until 1972 that video games began to garner mainstream availability and popularity. After several failed attempts, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created Pong and came together as video game publisher Atari. Pong was wildly successful, with the home version of the game selling more than 150,000 copies in 1975 alone.

The video game market exploded, with thousands of units being sold between 1975 and 1983, a time period known as the “golden age of arcade games.” However, the age of home computers almost wiped out the gaming market between 1983 and 1984, until a new Japanese company, Nintendo, released the Family Gaming Computer, or Famicom. This, along with Sega’s SG-1000 revived the market and ushered in a new era for gaming.

Arcade games, as well as early Sega and Nintendo games, pioneered the “8-bit” style that many people associate with early games. “8-bit” refers to a graphics system that operates on eight binary digits, or “bits,” meaning it can express up to 256 different values—or, in the case of graphics, colors. This limited range is what gives 8-bit games their simple and blocky style.

In spite of their limited palettes, the art of 8-bit games became instant classics, with hits like Megaman and Frogger. The first level of the original Super Mario Bros. is still recognizable to any gaming enthusiast today, and popular 8-bit characters such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and the Battletoads remain iconic.

16-Bit and Beyond

As video games reached the mid-1980s, revived by Nintendo’s success, arcade games hit their peak, and home gaming began to take over the market. The 1980s saw the first handheld consoles, like the Nintendo Game Boy and the Sega Game Gear, as well as a revolution in graphics. Thanks to improved microprocessors and display screens, video games could advance from 512 possible colors on screen to 65,536 (16-bit). This exponential increase meant huge new possibilities for designers, who took the opportunity to meld 3D and pixel art together into games with a new look.

The increase in quality, however, meant a decrease in the number of titles, especially as the mid-1990s began and graphics increased to 32-bit. Although 32-bit graphics offered another massive increase in quality, they also created a huge increase in cost. Brian Farrell, the president and CEO of THQ, a California-based video game company, suggested that many companies were “leaving [16-bit art] behind too quickly” as consumers struggled to keep up with rising prices.

However, at this point, the idea of retro gaming had begun to catch on, and collectors were eager to preserve consoles from previous generations. Re-releases of popular games such as The Legend of Zelda and Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei in the 1990s attracted a great deal of attention as collectors worried that prices for these classics would shoot up in the near future.

The 16- and 32-bit eras produced some of the most iconic titles in video games. Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega’s answer to Nintendo’s Super Mario series, was released in 1991, and Nintendo’s hit Super Metroid came soon after in 1994. The Metroid series, which remains ongoing, is still regarded as one of the best video game series of all time.

Modern-Day (2010s and 2020s) Pixel Games

Although video game graphics now range from colorful and cartoony to hyper-realistic, there remains a popular market for classic pixel games. Bright, colorful graphics and simple animations are nostalgic for many adult gamers, and a number of independent (or “indie”) game studios and developers have found success with their retro styles.

Stardew Valley is among the most popular of the 2010s pixel games. Released in 2016 by Eric Barone, known otherwise as “ConcernedApe,” Stardew Valley brings the player to its namesake small town, where they inherit a farm from their grandfather. While they work on bringing the farm back to life, the player encounters a wide cast of townsfolk with colorful personalities, discovers an abandoned mine shaft full of dangers and treasure, and works alongside a wizard to explore the secrets of the valley.

Following the success of Stardew, Barone has been working on his next game, Haunted Chocolatier. Although it will be presented in the same 32-bit art style, Barone announced that the gameplay would be much different, making the experience story-driven, rather than a simulation game.

Just as popular as Stardew Valley is Undertale, another indie game. The game’s developer, Toby Fox, wanted to create a role-playing game (RPG) that would allow the player the option to resolve conflicts peacefully. The simple, 8-bit style of Undertale was inspired by early Super Nintendo games like Brandish, as well as Nintendo’s late-1980s hit RPG, Mother.

Undertale was a massive critical success, earning a 92/100 on the media review site Metacritic, as well as two perfect 10s on Destructoid and IGN. The game also earned accolades at international game competitions, including the Japan Game Awards 2018, and SXSW Gaming Awards in 2016. Fox later released the first part of its sequel, Deltarune, in 2018, which is still coming out in chapters as of 2024.

The Future of Pixel Art

Developers like Eric Barone and Toby Fox have shown that there is still a thriving market for nostalgic, retro-style games, even for people who weren’t around during their initial releases. Although most big-name developers like Ubisoft and Bandai Namco have yet to pick up on the trend, the success of indie games like Stardew Valley and Undertale may soon offset the dominant AAA style of expensive, hyper-realistic graphics in games like The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 or God of War.

Additionally, many pixel games also take up less hard drive space, are more affordable, and run more smoothly on less-advanced computer builds than AAA games, which can cost upwards of $70 and require up to 200 GB or more of space. Aspects like these can often make them more appealing to players on a smaller budget without compromising on the quality or enjoyment of a game.

Indie game studios have also gained a surge in popularity following increasing dissatisfaction with AAA studios as the standard for video games. Gaming conventions specifically for indie games have gained popularity as well, with shows like Indie Games Expo drawing large crowds for more than ten years. Indie studios have also come to compete with corporate developers in larger shows as well, including PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) West, which had more than 120,000 attendees in 2023.

It’s clear from the popularity of indie pixel game titles that the style is here to stay. With talented indie developers like Cherry Studios (Hollow Knight) and Yacht Club Games (Shovel Knight), independent games and small teams continue to stand as major competitors with AAA titles.

When Van Gogh was living in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889-90, olive trees and cypresses became his most cherished subjects to paint. These trees were abundant in the region, and the artist believed they created a favorable impression of the Provençal landscape. In a letter to his brother Theo in 1889, he compared them to the willow tree in the Netherlands: “Now what the willow is in our native country, the olive tree and the cypress have exactly the same importance here.”

Vincent Van Gogh’s Olive Trees

The olive tree, with its sinuous branches, which thrived in the harsh conditions of Saint-Rémy, evoked great admiration in Van Gogh, who compared the cypress to an Egyptian obelisk and described its striking role in the Provençal landscape. Since the Provençal land was arid, not many trees bloomed there. However, olive trees took over the entire land, growing amid the dry and rocky terrain. Van Gogh produced numerous paintings of olive groves while residing at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy. During his early days, he was confined within the asylum walls and painted several works of the interior and the garden out front. However, after some time, he was allowed to walk around the land to paint outdoors. He visited olive groves often due to his fascination with them.

Van Gogh found them visually interesting due to their serpentine branches and the ever-changing effect of the bright Provençal sunlight on their colors, as depicted in the painting above. In fact, he struggled to capture its colors and treated it as a challenge: “On the other hand the olive trees are very characteristic, and I’m struggling to capture that. It’s silver, sometimes more blue, sometimes greenish, bronzed, whitening on ground that is yellow, pink, purplish or orangeish to dull red ochre. But very difficult, very difficult.” He tackled this issue by instilling the effects of silver on the leaves and painting the shadows of the trees in blue.

In The Olive Trees or Olive trees with the Alpilles in the background, Van Gogh depicts a summer scene with a wonderful effect of greens and yellows of the olive trees on the land with blues of the mountains and the sky. A white cloud highlighted with blue and yellow swirls on top of the mountains, which are contoured with bold outlines. The swirling lines and dramatic outlines in the composition create a sense of movement in the landscape. The olive trees with their twisting branches and trunks appear to be floating away along with the undulating hills. Due to its swirling lines, Van Gogh compared this painting to The Starry Night: “These are exaggerations from the point of view of the arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of the ancient woodcuts.”

Paintings of olive groves in Provence became a means for Van Gogh to convey the bright and hot climate of the region, as well as the aridity of the land. He wrote: “The olive trees are more in character, just as in the other study and I’ve tried to express the time of day when one sees the green beetles and the cicadas flying in the heat.” The color palette consists largely of yellows, greens, and blues, while the brushstrokes are short and curving.

Cypress Trees

The cypress tree was a towering presence both in Provence and in Van Gogh’s creative imagination. He expressed his wish to paint the cypress like his Sunflowers as both were challenging and interesting to paint in terms of their colors and forms: “When I’d done those sunflowers I was seeking the contrary and yet the equivalent, and I said, it’s the cypress.” He wanted to capture the character of the cypress through its deep colors and proportions against a luminous Provençal landscape: “It’s the dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape, but it’s one of the most interesting dark notes, the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine.”

Both paintings above depict a massive tree in dark green, with a distinguished quality highlighted in yellow, standing in front of a cloudy sky with shrubbery in the foreground. In one of the paintings, a yellow crescent moon peeks through on the right side of the canvas, while the other depicts two women walking in front of the cypress.

In Wheatfield with Cypresses, Van Gogh created a beautiful contrast between the dark green cypress standing amid a lively yellow wheatfield. On the left stands an olive tree painted in a lighter green, bringing together his two favorite Provençal motifs in one composition. This composition of a summer landscape sits under a blue sky with winding blue and white clouds. The entire scene, which was painted in situ, is enhanced with impasto, undulating lines, and vibrant colors that convey the bright sunlight and natural abundance of Provence. “The cypress is so characteristic of the landscape of Provence,” Van Gogh once wrote, and this painting is a testament to its position within the colorful land and azure sky of the region.

Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”

The Starry Night, one of Van Gogh’s most famous works, also features the cypress. It is the opposite of the bright summer landscape above and depicts the region during nighttime. The swirling lines in the sky, luminous twinkling stars, and a bright moon are usually the most captivating features of the painting. However, in the center stands a tall, dark silhouette of a cypress tree. As in the daytime paintings, this tree towers over the entire region and creates a stark contrast with the blues and yellows in the background. While painted in Provence, The Starry Night depicts imaginative elements that merge Van Gogh’s memories of Dutch and Provençal landscapes.

He painted this work from his asylum window, which would not have afforded such an expansive view of the village. The church steeple in the middle of the town is reminiscent of Dutch churches, which are different from Provençal churches. And yet, he considered including the cypress necessary to complement the turbulent sky and signal the Provençal character of the painting.

Country road in Provence by night was the last painting of the cypress tree Van Gogh made in Provence. With a tall cypress reaching for the sky, it became the central Provençal feature that was embedded in his mind by the end of his stay. There is a dimly lit crescent moon and a bright North Star in the evening sky on top of the canvas, while two people walk along the road in the foreground. The meandering path is occupied by a carriage and lined with a small house, while other tall cypresses punctuate the landscape behind.

The short brushstrokes and swirling lines of the composition exemplify Van Gogh’s signature technique to instill a sense of movement in his paintings that is accentuated with an array of colors placed next to each other harmoniously. At the same time, they give the painting a dream-like effect, perfectly showing how Van Gogh viewed and remembered Provence through the cypress.