Paintings
  Church
    Heart of the Andes
  Cole
    Expulsion from the Garden of Eden
    Course of Empire
      Savage State
      The Arcadian or Pastoral State
      Consummation
      Desolation
    Destruction
    Voyage of Life
      Childhood
      Manhood
      Old Age
      Youth
  The Hudson River School
Art and Mechanical Reproduction
  Daguerreotype
  Daguerreian Society
  Currier and Ives
  Images of Whitman (w/essay)
  Oliver Wendell Holmes on Photography
  Edgar Allan Poe on The Daguerreotype
  Emily Dickinson & Photography
Attractions
  Lost Museum (Barnum's Museum)
  Grand Moving Panorama of Pilgrim's Progress
Illustrating the Text
  E.W. Kemble's Huck illustrations
  Kemble's "Illustrating Huck Finn"
  Henry James on Illustration
  Images from Godey's Lady's Book
    "Frontispiece" (1857)
    "Learning to Write" (1857)
    "The Very Fine Lady" and "The Lady" (1857)
    "The Science of Dress" (1858)
    "The Science of Dress"
    Color Plate #1
    Color Plate #2
Texts
  Emerson - Art

Contact me at: 
mdesiderio@gc.cuny.edu
                                                                                           

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous,
black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three
blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy,
squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was
there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it
that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with
yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a
bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. - It's the Black
Sea in a midnight gale. - It's the unnatural combat of the four primal
elements. - It's a blasted heath. - It's a Hyperborean winter scene. - It's
the breaking- up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these
fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst.
That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear
a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great Leviathan himself?

Herman Melville, Moby Dick