Pieter Bruegel’s enormous painting Children’s Games is 118 x 161cm (46” x 63”) and throws us into the middle of a complicated street scene. Over 200 children play over 80 different games and we approach it with our modern eyes

Music is, to many people, very abstract. It is the only form of art that is a language of its own, and oftentimes it is difficult for the common listener to understand the true message of the composer without a

On the basis of his sentimental and declamatory verse, Alfred de Musset has not been well judged by mid-twentieth-century criticism. Yet, Musset is perhaps the first French poet since the Renaissance to make humor a vehicle for impulses essentially lyrical.

Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), was a leading painter in the Harlem Renaissance. In 1934, he created a 4-panel mural for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. This branch later became NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black

Arthur Rimbaud was highly critical of Alfred de Musset’s work. In his “Letters of a Seer” he wrote, “Musset did not accomplish anything because he closed his eyes before the visions.” Just exactly what visions Rimbaud had in mind we

The French dramatist, poet and novelist Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) is probably best known for his autobiographical novel La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (The Confession of a Child of the Century). It was inspired by his scandalous real-time affair

The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) is best known for his allegorical landscapes. Contemplating nature, he sought to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. He was looking not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of

Joseph von Eichendorff was the quintessential poet of the German landscape. His indirect mode of representation is almost pictorial. Fields, trees, woods, river and streams conjure up images experienced at morning, noon, evening, dusk, and night. Each moment has its