Long before museums became rainy weekend destinations, they were places of control and authority. Objects were gathered by popes, monarchs, scholars, and city governments, and it was they who decided what was worth keeping and, primarily, who was even allowed to see it. Public access came later, often at a time when governmental buildings were finally opened up. Visit the oldest museums in the world today, and you are not stepping into blank, modern containers built for a purpose. You are moving through spaces that carry centuries of fascinating history.

1. Capitoline Museums, Rome, Italy

Often dubbed THE oldest museums in the world, Rome‘s Capitoline Museums were created after a very blunt decision made in 1471 by Pope Sixtus IV (of Inquisition infamy). The forward-thinking cleric handed a group of ancient bronze statues to the city of Rome, including the Capitoline She-Wolf, shifting control of precious artworks away from the Church and into civic hands.

The statues were installed inside buildings used for Rome’s municipal administration, and the eclectic setting is a huge appeal nowadays. You walk through halls designed for stately officials, with imposing statues of emperors and gods positioned where they once gathered.

2. Vatican Museums, Vatican City

The Vatican Museums were founded in 1506, when Pope Julius II put the recently excavated Laocoön Group on display in the Vatican. The sculpture had been unearthed in Rome and immediately attracted attention from artists and scholars.

Over the next two centuries, popes kept adding sculptures, paintings, manuscripts, and scientific objects to the collection. Access was still tightly controlled, though, and early visitors were usually scholars or diplomats. Public access expanded slowly, but the original concept of exclusivity still somehow rings true. Considering it can take you hours to gain entry to the Vatican Museums today, that old-school snobbery has not exactly gone extinct.

Don’t miss the Gallery of Maps on the Belvedere Courtyard. It’s where you’ll find a collection of detailed topographical maps that show a united Italy about 300 years before actual unification occurred.

3. Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

Construction of the Uffizi (“Offices” in Italian) began in 1560 and was commissioned by Cosimo I de’ Medici to house Florence’s magistrates. Paintings in the upper floors and along the corridors didn’t appear until much later.

Those paintings signaled the patronage and influence of the Medici family, and when the lineage ended in 1737, Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici left the collection to the city under one firm condition: that it never leave Florence. That single clause froze a powerful family into a permanent public institution, and into the Italian history books forevermore.

4. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK

The Ashmolean opened in 1683 and is often called the first purpose-built public museum. It was created around the collection of Elias Ashmole, a scholar and collector with interests that ranged from ancient coins to botanical specimens.

What made the Ashmolean different was its connection to the University of Oxford. Objects were cataloged and studied as part of teaching and research, with early labels focusing on classification, context, and comparison.

5. Louvre Museum, Paris, France

The Louvre is one of the world’s oldest museums, yet it still manages to make headline news every now and then. The building itself is quite adept at rebranding itself, truth be told, going from medieval fortress to royal residence, then museum, then world-class heist site.

The decision to turn it into a museum was a deliberate political statement, at a time when art admiring was reserved for the monarchy. As a “take that” moment, it was seized and finally handed over to the people of France. The Louvre is considered quite sacred in the country to this day, as it stands as a symbol of arguably the most pivotal time in its history.

6. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

The Prado opened in 1819, using Spain’s royal collections, many assembled under the Habsburg monarchy. From the start, it was intended as a public museum, but its content remained closely tied to court culture. The collections cover hundreds of years of exquisite art, and not only is it one of the oldest museums in the world, but it is also one of Europe’s most respected.

7. National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark

Formally established in 1807, Denmark’s national museum was primarily founded on royal collections and antiquarian research. Its founders were much more interested in how people lived, rather than just what elites owned, and the collections clearly reflect that.

The museum grouped prehistoric, medieval, and ethnographic material to explain trade and social structures at different times in history. This approach helped establish archaeology as a systematic discipline and shifted museum focus more toward understanding long-term human activity rather than individual masterpieces.

8. British Museum, London, England

The British Museum was founded in 1753 and opened to the public in 1759. Its initial collection came from Sir Hans Sloane, whose own interests reflected the ideas of the Enlightenment, which dictated that gathering knowledge across cultures was perfectly valid. And so it gathered manuscripts, artifacts, and specimens through colonial networks that extended far beyond Britain’s borders.

As Britain expanded globally, the museum’s collections grew exponentially through excavation, diplomacy, and colonial administration. That history of “finders keepers” is still very much visible in the sheer range of objects on display from just about every corner of the world and continues to shape discussions about ownership and restitution.

9. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

The Kunsthistorisches Museum opened in 1891 to house the collections, accumulated over centuries, of the illustrious Habsburg Dynasty. The paintings, antiquities, and decorative arts on display were gathered through a mix of birthright inheritance, patronage, and territorial expansion.

Opening the collection to the public followed much broader changes in Europe, as more and more empires began turning private collections into national institutions in the hope of appeasing public discontent and pressure to reform authority.

10. Egyptian Museum (Now Grand Egyptian Museum), Cairo, Egypt

The Egyptian Museum opened in 1902, after decades of concern about the fast flow of antiquities leaving Egypt, bound for Europe. Early archaeology had often served foreign collectors first and foremost, and the museum was an attempt to keep discoveries within their country of origin.

For much of the 20th century, it housed the majority of Egypt’s major finds and shaped how ancient Egypt was presented internationally. The new Grand Egyptian Museum near Giza has opened gradually through phased previews since 2023, though the original 1902 Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square remains open. While the building itself is new, the collection and institutional history still trace back to the early 20th century, so its placement on this list is more than deserved.

Author Henry James constantly moved between two worlds: from the 19th century to the 20th, realism to modernism, and America to Europe. Like many expatriate American writers who followed him in the 20th century, he developed a double consciousness, taking on the ways of his adopted English society but retaining an ability to analyze it as an outsider. He drew on this double life to write novels revered as much for their notoriously difficult prose as for their presentation of contrasts between the Old World and the New.

Early Life in New England

The James family was famously brilliant. Henry James Sr. was a utopian theologian immersed in the intellectual life of mid-19th-century Massachusetts, rubbing shoulders with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

When his children were born, he was living in Washington Square, New York City, the eponymous location of an early novel by his son. Henry James Jr. would describe the neighborhood as having “a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city.” Here, one might “come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest” (James 2001, p. 13). He would never completely lose this interest in the genteel world of high-society New York, but he would cast his sights further afield before long.

Henry James Jr. was born in 1843, a year after his brother William, who would go on to become an eminent and innovative psychologist. William James’s experimental, empiricist psychology was founded on his early training in physiology and medicine, as well as an interest in philosophy, in which he took after his father.

William and Henry James were close to their sister Alice, whose bouts of mental illness seem to have influenced both brothers’ work. Alice was also a writer, keeping a diary for the last three years of her life, which has become a source of scholarly interest for its revelations about the James family and in its own right, as a study of illness.

A Cosmopolitan Youth

A cosmopolitan, in the 19th century, was someone whose worldview was untrammeled by national borders; someone who had spent time absorbing the culture of multiple countries. In America, particularly, someone who had traveled extensively in Europe. The James family was as cosmopolitan as they come.

Henry was not yet one when his father sold the house in Washington Square, and the family upped sticks to Europe. They returned intermittently to New York, but between the ages of 12 and 17, Henry spent more time abroad than at home. His father’s work took him to intellectual centers such as Paris, Geneva, and London.

According to 19th-century tradition, a young American returning from such travels could now consider himself sufficiently worldly and cultured to become a writer, which James did after quickly abandoning his studies at Harvard Law School. From the very start, James was interested in what he would later term ‘the art of fiction,’ publishing criticism as well as stories, and making friends with important figures in the literary circles of New York, Boston, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In his late twenties, he felt a pull to return to Europe. There, he mixed with even more eminent Victorians, many of them cosmopolitans like himself. From the world of English literature, he met George Eliot (who was working on her own novels set partly in Europe, 1871’s Middlemarch and 1876’s Daniel Deronda), Charles Dickens, and the critics Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin.

Rome and Paris offered long-term prospects for James as a foreign correspondent for American publications. In 1875, he spent a year living in Paris’s famed Latin Quarter, again managing to make the acquaintance of authors whose names would go down in history: Émile Zola, the master of literary naturalism; Guy de Maupassant, practitioner of the short story; Ivan Turgenev, advocate of Russian literature in the West.

The stage was set for James to start penning classics of his own. His early novels dealt, perhaps predictably enough, with wealthy heiresses in New York society, struggling artists in Rome, and the contrasting values and ways of life in the New World of America versus the Old World of Europe. See his revealingly titled novels The American (1877) and The Europeans (1878).

Settling in England

It was not until he settled in London that James hit his stride, drawing together the influences of his affluent, learned New England upbringing with his cosmopolitan education and passion for the literary traditions of France and England.

Moving among the upper echelons of British society, James developed an interest in (and a keen ability to analyze) both the people within this society and the effects of this society on outsiders such as himself. Americans, with their innocent optimism and zeal for taking life by the horns, might easily find themselves at odds with world-weary Europeans, whose cynicism comes from having seen and done everything that the Old World, stuffed with so many artistic treasures that beauty becomes passé, has to offer.

Many of James’s friends and readers were well-off women. Unsurprisingly, his first successful novels featured protagonists plucked from this demographic: Daisy Miller (1878) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Both novels examine the problems of courtship for young, wealthy, and brilliant women whose privileged, cosmopolitan experiences set them at odds with the norms of behavior for married women.

James has been both praised and criticized for how he portrays women. He claimed to have been inspired by George Eliot’s ordinary yet remarkable heroines, such as Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. “Place the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,” he wrote, “and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish” (James 1908, Preface).

This is partially an explanation of James’s approach in Portrait of a Lady, which is considered his first masterpiece for the way it interrogates the interiority of its heroine, Isabel Archer, as she contemplates marriage and throughout her marriage to the egotistical Gilbert Osmond. It is also more broadly a defense of his highly interiorized technique. James admired Eliot’s ability to prove how much her female characters “insist[ed] on mattering” by placing them front and center in her novels, making their consciousnesses adequate subjects for serious, intellectual fiction, and he aimed to do the same.

The 1890s: James’s Crisis Point

By the late 1880s and early 1890s, James was living in London, often visiting Paris and re-immersing himself in French literature. His 1890 novel The Tragic Muse, with its actress protagonist, revealed his strong interest in the theater, and was followed by an attempt to conquer the West End.

Guy Domville, which premiered in January 1895, ran for just one month and was greeted with booing. Audiences did not quite share James’s interest in the conflict between worldly and religious lives, played out in the 18th-century protagonist’s flirtations with entering a monastery versus continuing the family line. Famously, when the protagonist spoke the line, “I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles,” an audience member shouted out: “It’s a bloody good thing you are!”

The conflict in Guy Domville was pertinent to James: not because he had designs upon a religious life but because celibacy and all-male companionship were on his mind. Guy Domville was staged by the manager of the St. James’s Theater, George Alexander, already known for promoting Oscar Wilde’s comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892). Alexander would become notorious later in 1895 as the producer of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which was running at St. James’s when the playwright was arrested and convicted for homosexuality.

Perhaps in the spirit of rivalry, James had called Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband “crude,” “feeble,” and “vulgar.” But in a letter reacting to Wilde’s arrest, he stressed the “sickening horribility” of having one’s private life exposed and made into a “spectacle” (Matheson 726).

Objecting to the indignity of being made conspicuous for one’s sexuality, James here fuels the theory of several critics who have speculated that he was closeted. Like his friend Robert Louis Stevenson in the classic Gothic novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, James seemed interested in the possibilities afforded by modern, urban life for hiding in plain sight.

The 1890s brought James a series of personal and professional crises, which, as the themes of Guy Domville suggest, must have made him conscious of his public perception. He was brought down by the deaths of his sister Alice in 1892, then Stevenson in 1894, and then his close friend Constance Fenimore Woolson.

An erudite, cosmopolitan writer like James, Woolson had kept up an intense, 14-year friendship with him, founded on rivalry and mutual obfuscation. Both felt they had something to hide. It remains open to debate what, exactly, they felt for each other: words flowed freely between them when discussing each other’s work, but when it came to their feelings, a wall of silence sprang up. Undoubtedly, James was affected by her probable suicide in Venice in 1894. From here on, his work grew yet more contemplative, yet more complex.

Henry James’s Masterpieces

After the hardships of the 1890s, James reached his apex as a writer, although he now stuck firmly to novels, short stories, and criticism. In works from the late 1890s and 1900s, he integrated his previous ‘international theme’ with an interest in drama, psychological depth, and awakening consciousness of sexuality.

He published The Turn of the Screw in 1898: a Gothic horror novella which turns on the unreliable narration of a governess who believes her young wards to be possessed by the spirits of former staff at the mansion. Part of the governess’s outrage (although it is not quite overtly spelled out) comes from the possibility that these children have, through these evil spirits, been exposed to sexual knowledge.

The Awkward Age, the following year, was less Gothic in style but similarly explored a young girl’s awareness of sexuality among the adults around her, as did What Maisie Knew (1897). James’s increasingly oblique style matched this subject. The novels are full of euphemism and circumlocution, mimicking the way people talk around their feelings (and juxtaposing it with the straight-talking of children).

Other masterpieces from this period were The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). James’s themes of cosmopolitan experience and the problem of marriage, especially for women, remain intact. With these novels, though, James mastered the prose for which he is known: both wandering and precise, fixated on pursuing every facet of a character’s inner workings and thought processes.

Final Years and Impact

Henry James wrote most of his masterpieces after settling in the English seaside town of Rye in 1898, in a Georgian villa called Lamb House. He lived here for the next 18 years, only returning to America for short visits. He never married, but devoted himself to filling Lamb House with art, developing its gardens, and inviting numerous literary friends, including H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad.

In the early 1900s, James undertook the huge task of editing and compiling his novels for a collection known as the New York edition, revising some and writing prefaces explaining his intentions. By this time, he was dictating his words to a secretary rather than writing or typing them himself, which has been proposed as a reason for his labyrinthine sentences.

Yet each word is scrupulously chosen, and it can often take more than one reading to comprehend a Henry James sentence. Take this example, from his 1908 preface to Portrait of a Lady:

“These are the fascinations of the fabulist’s art, these lurking forces of expansion, these necessities of upspringing in the seed, these beautiful determinations, on the part of the idea entertained, to grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly flower there; and, quite as much, these fine possibilities of recovering, from some good standpoint on the ground gained, the intimate history of the business – of retracing and reconstructing its steps and stages.” (James 1908, Preface)

By the time the First World War broke out, James had good reason to consider himself more English than American. Like many in Britain’s artistic circles, he was horrified by the prospect of war in Europe, a place he saw as a cradle of culture and freedom. As an American, James was doubly horrified at his home nation’s initial lack of intervention. In 1915, in an act of protest, he gave up his American citizenship and became a naturalized British citizen.

His fiction remains difficult to categorize because of this straddling of worlds. In terms of style, he matured to a prolix, dense prose that, especially in its psychological complexity, anticipated modernist writers who would come to maturity just after his death in 1916, such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

He can be grouped with British writers of the period, sharing the cosmopolitan vision of predecessors such as George Eliot and John Ruskin; but his reflections on American sensibility set him apart. Ultimately, this double vision from a long, transnational life makes Henry James unlike any other author. It’s no wonder readers call him The Master.

Sources

• James, Henry (1908). The Portrait of a Lady, New York edition.
• James, Henry (2001). Washington Square. Project Gutenberg edition.
• Matheson, Neill (1999). ‘Talking Horrors: James, Euphemism, and the Specter of Wilde’, American Literature Vol. 71, No. 4.

The mysterious painter Giorgio de Chirico constructed his own nonexistent cities in the middle of nowhere based on his childhood memories, dreams, and experiences. His paintings were intriguing and slightly disturbing, with sunlit squares and deserted streets evoking strange anxiety and terror. He was one of the founding fathers of Italian modernism yet hated modern art with passion, looking for inspiration in the works of the Old Masters. Read on to familiarize yourself with the most important works by Giorgio de Chirico.

1. The Child’s Brain: The Influential Work of Giorgio de Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico was born in 1888 in Greece into a family of Italians of Greek origins. His parents were hereditary nobility, and the artist proudly admitted that his father, Sicilian baron Evariste de Chirico, was the only sibling in his family who expressed the desire to work in his life. De Chirico’s father passed away when the artist was only seventeen, but he remained a lasting and recognizable figure in his mature works. According to de Chirico’s memoirs and the recollections of family friends, the future artist admired his father, yet their relationship was never as close as he wished it to be. He craved affection, which his father, an educated and intelligent man raised in an upper-class environment, was unable to express.

The Child’s Brain lingers between a childhood memory and a Freudian nightmare. The father is present yet passive, with his eyes closed. His nude torso and the position of a book on a table in front of him suggest possible sexual connotations of the scene, possibly accidentally witnessed by the artist in his early years. Like many artists of his time, de Chirico read Sigmund Freud and reflected upon his theories of childhood and sexuality.

Apart from the significance of the father figure to the artist, the painting had a remarkable life of its own. Soon after its completion, the future leader of the Surrealists, Andre Breton, saw it from the bus window and was so impressed that he jumped off at the next stop to buy it immediately. Despite de Chirico’s later scorn for modern art, Breton’s encounter with his work helped establish Surrealism as we know it.

2. Gare Montparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure)

Trains and railway stations were among the most popular motifs used by de Chirico in his works. Like the paternal figure with a recognizable mustache, they occurred from the artist’s family history. His father was a railroad engineer who worked on railway construction in Greece. His projects were meant to reorganize and reconstruct the vast and empty spaces of Thessaly province. In a similar manner, Giorgio de Chirico reorganized his imaginary spaces. To him, engineering was the method of perceiving and studying deep space. Apart from the philosophical perspective, drafts and instruments from his father’s desk have certainly affected de Chirico’s technical skill and inclination.

A railway station represents a liminal space—the point of transition and transformation. Unlike other spaces occupied by humans, stations, and airports are designed not to be inhabited or interacted with in any productive manner but only to be left behind for a more promising, desirable, or important location. This status grants liminal spaces an uncanny feeling of impermanence and blurred identity. De Chirico reinforces these feelings by leaving these spaces empty. Designed to contain moving and transforming human beings, empty railway stations evoke anxiety and identity crises caused by the inability to define one’s state of existence.

3. The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

Unlike most other paintings by de Chirico, The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street contains a surprisingly dynamic and lively element: a small dark figure of a little girl running with her hoop. Some art experts believe that de Chirico borrowed the figure from another iconic pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Most likely, de Chirico recognized the hallucinatory qualities of Seurat’s technique. Images created by thousands of small primary-colored dots seemed to move on their own, nauseating the viewer.

However, de Chirico’s running girl could not for sure be categorized as a living being. In the contrasting deserted cityscape, the figure seemed to be nothing but a deceptive shadow, luring the unsuspecting viewer into a trap. The shadow moves from one dark corner to another, as if afraid to be captured and dissolved by light. The menacing presence of something yet unsees is intensified by another silhouette. An immobile tall figure hides behind the corner, casting a dark shadow on a sunlit piazza.

Yet, despite allegedly borrowing the figure from one of the most significant paintings in the history of Modern art, de Chirico despised modernism with his entire heart. He even called it one of the two most disastrous aspects of contemporary civilization, rivaled only by Nazist ideology. In his art and studies, de Chirico relied mostly on the works of the Italian Old Masters and their centuries-long traditions. In his later years, he even attempted to destroy most of his early paintings, which were much more experimental than those of his mature period. He even confronted art historians and rejected the attribution of some paintings. Fortunately, Giorgio de Chirico did not succeed, with enough of his old works still preserved in museums and private collections.

De Chirico’s scorn for modern art was personal. His early works, presented at the time when Cubism and early abstraction dominated the scene, were often dismissed as ‘decorative’ by pro-avant-garde critics. Over the years, he distanced himself from the rest of the Modernists, constructing the myth of the misunderstood and isolated painter.

Ironically, despite this intense hatred, it was de Chirico who played the decisive role in forming one of the two most important movements in the history of Italian modernism—the Metaphysical painting. The second crucial movement was Futurism, which soon cross-contaminated with de Chirico’s theory. One of the most influential futurists of his era, Carlo Carra, briefly worked with de Chirico in 1917 before moving to more archaic forms of painting inspired by Giotto.

4.  The Disquieting Muses

This Metaphysical painting focused on representing the unseen and unreal while using familiar objects and classical architecture. There were no fantastic creatures, strange forms, or fairytale actions involved. The surreal effect of deceit was created by elements that would not raise any suspicion in any other setting. Deserted spaces and contrasting light question the purpose and appropriateness of these objects and blur the line between the animate and the inanimate. The mannequins, depicted in one of the many versions of the famous Disquieting Muses painting, evoke terror because of the blurred distinction between life and death. The painting later inspired the famous poet Sylvia Plath to write a poem with the same name.

Relying on Italian architecture and memories of his Greek childhood, de Chirico found another inspiration in German philosophy. The keys to his oeuvre can be found in the writings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. In his writings, Nietzsche often suggested a hidden meaning behind everyday objects, an unseen life underneath the existing reality. Apart from sharing ideas, the philosopher and the artist had one more thing in common: both found physical reflections of their concepts in the Italian city of Turin. There, Nietzsche spent his final years calling it the only suitable place for him. Giorgio de Chirico found his dramatic contrast of light and shadow created by the arches and covered walkways of Turin.

5. Giorgio de Chirico’s Self-Portrait

Self-portrature was particularly important for de Chirico, especially in his 1920s period. Then, he started to doubt his previous artistic beliefs and connections and began further distancing himself from other artists. This self-portrait remains a perfect illustration of the company in which de Chirico wanted to see himself: the angle and pose of his portrait were copied directly from sixteenth-century paintings. Next to it is a painted sculptural bust of the artist in profile—an homage to the art of Classical Antiquity.

At that time, de Chirico adopted not only compositional but also technical methods of the old masters. Apart from his usual oil paint, he began to use tempera—an egg-based medium widely employed by painters before the 1500s. Tempera dried quickly and did not allow for mixing colors, so artists had to paint gradients with small strokes of unmixed colors. Starting from the 1920s and until his death in 1978, Giorgio de Chirico saw his mission in reviving the principles of traditional techniques and iconography. Still, his early period of work remains his most famous and influential.

Salvador Dali was the most famous of all Surrealists, most closely associated with the movement’s visual codes and ideology. Yet, he was not the most pleasant person to deal with. He was aggressive and violent, mostly towards women, and openly expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler, later trying to turn it into a joke. In 1939, the Surrealist group had enough of it and officially banished Dali from their circles. Read on to learn more about Salvador Dali’s dramatic breakup with other Surrealists.

Salvador Dali: Controversial Since Childhood

Salvador Dali’s immense popularity is a phenomenon that keeps both art experts and museum visitors astonished and puzzled. Apart from his obvious artistic accomplishments, many aspects of his personality were too shocking to ignore as byproducts of creative eccentricity. In fact, the Surrealist group officially expelled him from their ranks after tolerating his behavior for several years.

Most accounts of Dali’s personality and his escapades came from his 1942 autobiography. Although its credibility remains debatable, it nonetheless painted a sufficient picture of Dali’s public persona. At the age of five, he pushed his friend off a suspension bridge. As the boy lay bleeding below, little Dali sat nearby, eating cherries and watching the boy suffer. Later, he admitted to being delighted by the adults’ shock and panic while the doctors treated the injured child. A year later, he kicked his three-year-old sister in her head, believing it was a ball. Dali recounted the stories of his childhood cruelty with obvious joy, if not pride, savoring every detail.

As he got older, his behavior turned worse. In his late twenties, he ‘trampled’ a woman who complimented the beauty of his feet. Dali’s friends had to physically remove him from his bleeding victim. The artist’s entire life was filled with terrible stories of attacks on women, including his wife Gala, who suffered several broken bones after arguing with Dali.

In 1929, after his successful solo exhibition, Dali became a member of the Surrealist movement in Paris. Although the group recognized his outstanding artistic skill, his aggressive behavior and bizarre jokes often caused discomfort to others. Gradually, Dali’s opinions became even more concerning. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, he started to publicly express his fascination with Adolf Hitler, even claiming that he fantasized about him in erotic terms. These claims shocked other group members, who largely shared left-wing views. Many of them were devoted communists and victims of Fascist regimes in Spain and Germany. Still, that did not stop Dali from praising Hitler while being in the same room with people who suffered from his actions.

Dali Versus Surrealists

Dali’s disturbing behavior and outrageous political views had long stirred discomfort inside artistic circles. No other artist was more aware of the depths of Dali’s views and aspirations than the ideological leader of the Surrealist movement, Andre Breton. Breton was a devoted anti-fascist and a member of the French Communist Party, radically intolerant of any form of pro-fascist discourse. Over the years of Dali’s presence in Surrealist circles, Breton amassed a collection of letters shocking and disturbing enough to lead him to action.

In fact, Breton subjected Dali to semi-public trials not once but twice. For the first time, in 1934, the leader of the Surrealists accused the Spanish painter of supporting a then-new phenomenon of Hitlerian fascism. Dali claimed that the new violent regime was Surrealist in its nature and defended its methods as the latest and original artistic expression. In his earlier writings, Breton himself called for artists to “work outside all aesthetic and moral preoccupations,” yet Dali seemed to take it too literally.

Some art historians even believe that Dali’s insistence on the matter was merely a methodical effort to offend Breton and destabilize his position as the group’s leader. The 1934 trial did not lead to any substantial result. Dali managed to deflate the tension with another string of pretentious and absurd jokes and win the sympathies of several prominent Surrealists like Paul Eluard and Tristan Tzara. The trial ended with a collective warning that did little to contain Dali’s creative pursuits.

In 1939, Breton’s limit of patience was finally exhausted. By that time, he had amassed a collection of shocking letters that served as evidence of either Dali’s insanity or immense cruelty. These letters were lost over the years of Breton’s travels, and only recently they were suddenly rediscovered—partially in Breton’s archive and in private collections of art critics close to the Surrealist circles. In them, Dali praised Hitler and Francisco Franco, the Spanish fascist dictator who forced thousands, including some Surrealist artists, to flee the country, fearing for their lives. He expressed his bizarre plans to create a new world religion based on white people enslaving all other races, establishing human sacrifice as the cultural norm, and turning Surrealists into priests. In other letters, he praised Hitler and expressed admiration for racist violence in the United States. He explained that although he felt a certain pity for the lynching victims, these scenes filled him with “real pleasure and considerable sexual excitement.” Breton preserved these letters to use in the second trial that finally made Dali unwelcome among the Surrealists and formally expelled him from the group.

Dali’s Life After Surrealism

After his dramatic expulsion, despite Breton’s efforts, not much changed for Dali and his career. If anything, this isolated him from the rest of the Surrealist community and cemented his reputation as an independent and unique eccentric genius. Dali had no intention of apologizing or clarifying his views—instead, he stated that he was the only real Surrealist anyway and did not need any associates.

Dali’s hyperinflated ego and talent for commerce effectively turned his isolation into an artistic monopoly. Without the constraints of other members’ opinions, he developed his own brand of Surrealism—highly commercialized, populist, and shocking just enough to impress but not repulse. Single-handedly, Dali became the emblem of the movement, striving further and further away from the initial principles laid by Andre Breton. Among his ex-colleagues, Dali was known as Avida Dollars—an anagram of his name, loosely translated as “eager for dollars.” Dali starred in TV commercials, designed product packaging, and sold every bit of his expressive effort for large sums.

The Secret Life of Salvador Dali

In 1942, Salvador Dali published an autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, which soon became the most cited account of both his creative accomplishments and wrongdoings. To accept this book as entirely truthful would be a great misunderstanding of Dali’s character. Some critics praised it, writing the book off as a satirical comedy rather than an actual account of the artist’s life.

Among the most prominent critics of the book was the famous writer George Orwell. Two years after the publication, he published a book review that was essentially a prolonged essay on morals, obscenity, and the debatable right of an artist to transgress the norms of the larger society they inhabit. Although his account may seem overly conservative and even prudish, one of Orwell’s points remains too accurate to debate: Dalí’s exceptional artistic skill and ability to work hard have set him apart from ordinary people.

The crowd eagerly forgave the most shocking, repulsive, and dangerous instances of his expression under the umbrella of the presupposed genius. In Orwell’s eyes, Dali was simultaneously a good artist and a “disgusting human being,” with both characteristics hardly contradicting or invalidating each other. Even if, as Orwell insisted, some of Dali’s wild stories were completely fictional, nonetheless, the artist intended them to be perceived as truth. And that, in itself, was enough to question Dali’s public prominence.

Was Salvador Dali Really a Fascist?

Some critics insist that at the core of Dali’s eccentricity lay not genuine political beliefs but the artistic desire to shock. Moreover, they see the infamous letters as a provocation aimed to enrage Andre Breton by questioning his staunchest beliefs. As we know, that goal was effectively reached, infuriating not only Breton but the entire Surrealist circle.

And yet, even if we somehow ignore Dali’s penchant for violence and a shocking lack of self-awareness, would it really matter what his true beliefs were? The stories of injured children and attacks on women could have been products of his imagination, but that does not make them any more acceptable. Dali’s support of Franco and Hitler had very real and tangible consequences for the people affected by these men’s politics. If anything, Dali’s story is a remarkable example of how easily the public can let go of the greatest atrocities, not hidden but proudly paraded in front of them, to willingly fall for the charm of a “great genius” with all eccentricities and peculiarities.

Vincent van Gogh is a world-renowned artist known for works such as Starry Night and The Sunflowers, as well as the infamous incident of him cutting off his ear during a psychotic episode. But there is more to him—Van Gogh had a very interesting and eventful life. He dealt with many hardships and had complex relationships with his family and peers. His personal life had a profound impact on his art, making it all the more important to fully understand and experience what he created.

1. Vincent Van Gogh’s Father Was a Minister

Van Gogh’s father, Theodorus van Gogh, was a Protestant minister in the Netherlands. Theodorus’ father, Van Gogh’s grandfather, was also a pastor who confirmed Theodorus. For most of Van Gogh’s life, his father remained a preacher in the province of North-Brabant in the Netherlands, primarily in Zundert, Etten-Leur, and Nuenen. Vincent had a strained relationship with his father. He was unable to hold a job, earn a living, and even gave up his training to become a pastor to become an artist instead. He did not succeed as an artist during his lifetime, which added to the tension.

To add to that, Vincent fell in love with his cousin Kee Vos-Stricker when he was 28 years old, which was disapproved of by his parents. Most of Vincent’s adult life was spent with a rift between him and his father, as the former felt misunderstood while the latter wanted his son to follow a conventional path. Theodorus van Gogh passed away in 1885 due to a stroke, long before Vincent’s success.

2. He Had an Older Brother Who Died at Birth

While Van Gogh was the oldest of six children, he was not the first child of his parents. In 1852, one year before Van Gogh was born, his parents had a baby who unfortunately did not survive. The baby was also named Vincent Willem van Gogh, and the family decided to bury him in their hometown of Zundert, North-Brabant, in the cemetery of the church where Theodorus was the minister. Vincent van Gogh, the artist, was born exactly one year later, on March 30, 1853, and was named after his stillborn brother. Several researchers have even speculated that the psychological problems that Van Gogh suffered from were linked to his stillborn brother. The grave of his brother can still be visited today in Zundert, located next to the Vincent van GoghHuis museum, which preserves Van Gogh’s childhood home and legacy in Zundert.

3. He Was a Missionary Before Becoming an Artist

For the early part of his adult life, Van Gogh followed in his father’s footsteps to join the church. He was studying to become a minister in 1877 under the guidance of his uncle, but he wasn’t interested in studying for the theology entrance exam, which resulted in him taking up a lower position as a lay preacher in a Belgian mining village called the Borinage in 1879. He was eager to continue his passion to serve God and performed his duties as a preacher to the villagers.

Van Gogh was an empathetic man. He witnessed extreme poverty in the Borinage and recognized the hardships of the villagers, as many people died in the mines and families lived on scraps. Whatever Van Gogh could give away, he did. He shared his food and clothes and started living extremely frugally. This lifestyle was not acceptable to his superiors, who believed it portrayed a negative image for a preacher to be living like a man in poverty. Van Gogh was eventually removed from his position at the Borinage, but he still carried his religious teachings with him as an artist, as well as a desire to help others.

4. His Family Was Involved in Art

Vincent van Gogh had an uncle named Vincent Willem van Gogh (nicknamed ‘Uncle Cent’) who ran the branch of the art dealership Goupil & Cie in The Hague. The dealership had branches in London, Brussels, The Hague, and Paris. Van Gogh’s introduction to art started with his family’s involvement in the industry. As a sixteen-year-old boy, he started working as an art salesman in The Hague and familiarized himself with famous artists and the developments in the art world. His younger brother Theo also started to work in the Brussels branch of Goupil & Cie in 1873. Van Gogh was transferred to the London branch that year and to Paris in 1875.

Van Gogh’s opinions on art were strong and not always conventional, which is why it became difficult for him to connect with customers. Eventually, he was told to leave the dealership, while his younger brother Theo went on to become a successful art dealer in Paris. Theo’s connections in the art world encouraged Van Gogh to pursue a life as an artist—he sold his works to Theo, who in turn attempted to sell them in Paris, albeit with little success.

5. He Only Became an Artist at the Age of 27

Van Gogh’s decision to become an artist was made quite unexpectedly. He tried several career directions, including teaching and religion, but eventually settled on art. By 1877, he was set to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a clergyman. He had become incredibly religious and wished to serve God by becoming a preacher. He was posted in the Belgian village of Borinage as a missionary, but halfway through his work, he decided to switch to art. The catalyst of this decision was his brother Theo’s advice—Vincent often included small sketches of the Borinage miners in the letters he sent to Theo.

Theo, seeing a real potential and passion in his brother’s work, advised him to continue with drawing and take it more seriously. In 1881, Van Gogh sought his cousin’s husband, the painter Anton Mauve, for training. Apart from this, Van Gogh did not receive any formal artistic training. He learned to work with oil paints and watercolors under Mauve’s tutelage, and the latter had a great impact on Van Gogh’s early practice.

6. He Created More Than 2,000 Artworks in His Lifetime

Despite being an artist for only the last 10 years of his life, Van Gogh managed to create over 2,000 artworks, including both drawings and oil paintings. This is an extraordinary number, as many artists spent weeks or months on a single painting. However, Van Gogh worked quickly and intuitively, which made it possible for him to produce such a large number of works. He wrote to Theo in September 1888 explaining how he was able to finish one painting a day by spending all day out in nature working at his easel—“Today I worked again from 7 o’clock in the morning until 6 o’clock in the evening without moving except to eat a bite a stone’s throw away. And that’s why the work’s going fast.”

His particularly productive period was the 15 months he spent in Arles, southern France, between 1888 and 1889. Here, Van Gogh produced around 200 paintings and 100 drawings. The decision to move to Arles was rooted in his longing for the peace of the countryside, having spent two years in Paris. The quietness and slow life of the country, as well as the bright, almost blinding sunlight in Arles, resulted in some of the best and most luminous works that Van Gogh painted throughout his entire career, such as the series of orchards in blossom, The Harvest (1888), and The Sunflowers (1888-89).

7. Van Gogh Also Painted From Memory

Van Gogh had a recurring argument with his artist friend Paul Gauguin about the correct manner to paint. Van Gogh took his inspiration from nature, while Gauguin insisted on painting from memory or the imagination. The latter followed a Symbolist manner of painting that was poetic and decorative. However, there are instances where Van Gogh also painted from memory. For example, the painting titled “Memory of the Garden at Etten (Ladies of Arles),” created in November 1888, was painted from memory, incorporating some imaginative elements.

Van Gogh explained how he was inspired by Gauguin to paint from the imagination, writing: “Gauguin gives me courage to imagine, and the things of the imagination do indeed take on a more mysterious character.” Van Gogh’s portrait titled La Bercuse, completed in January 1889, was also created from memory, with only a few studies from a model as a reference. Although he dabbled in Symbolist painting, Van Gogh remained connected with nature and took his inspiration from reality for the majority of his career.

8. He Signed His Works as Vincent

Being a Dutchman, Van Gogh’s last name was—and still is—difficult to pronounce correctly for most people. It is pronounced “Van Gokh” in Dutch, but the pronunciation has several variations today. During his life, he was hoping to gain recognition as an artist but feared that his difficult last name would be a hindrance. This led him to decide to sign his paintings only as Vincent. Another reason for this was his wish to separate himself from the family name. His father and uncle were both preachers, and another uncle ran the successful art dealership branch of Goupil & Cie in The Hague. Having been constantly rebuked for his life decisions and career choices, Vincent wanted to follow his own path and be known for his efforts, rather than his family name.

9. He Had a Serious Relationship With a Woman Named Sien

While it is known that Van Gogh never married, he did have a serious relationship with a woman named Sien Hoornik in 1882. Sien was a seamstress and a sex worker. She had a young daughter and was pregnant with another, and Van Gogh wanted to help her. Eventually, the two formed a mutual understanding of each other’s struggles and decided to live together. This was greatly disapproved of by Van Gogh’s family, but he empathized with Sien and believed that they could fulfill the need for a family for each other through their relationship.

He wrote in May 1882: “She and I are two unfortunates who keep each other company and bear the burden together, and it’s in that way that unhappiness is turned into happiness and the unbearable is made bearable.” However, they never got married. Eventually, Van Gogh and Sien separated as they both felt dissatisfied with the relationship. For Sien, the life of an artist was not very attractive, and Van Gogh’s feelings for Sien were not as strong as they had been for Kee Vos-Stricker. He also caved under the pressure of his family, especially Theo, to end the relationship.

10. Van Gogh Became Famous Because of His Sister-In-Law

Van Gogh did not gain any fame during his lifetime despite producing a great number of paintings and drawings. But today, he is one of the most famous artists from Europe. The story of his posthumous success was possible only because of his sister-in-law, Theo’s wife, Jo van Gogh-Bonger. After both Vincent and Theo passed away, Jo took it upon herself to make the name of Van Gogh known in the Netherlands.

She worked alongside Theo’s contacts in the art world and successfully organized multiple exhibitions and sales of Van Gogh’s paintings. In 1905, Van Gogh’s works were exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, marking a significant milestone. Jo also worked tirelessly to compile the letters shared between Vincent and Theo into a book in order to share Vincent’s thoughts and emotions. She believed that to understand Van Gogh’s art, people needed to understand the artist first. Her efforts were clearly successful, and the name of Van Gogh is known worldwide because of Jo.

Today, the Van Gogh Museum is one of the most famous museums in the world. It stands as a well-preserved legacy of the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh who has become a symbol of national pride for the Netherlands. The museum, located in Amsterdam, attracted almost two million visitors in 2024 and can easily be spotted due to the long queues of people outside the entrance. A trip to Amsterdam always calls for a visit to the Van Gogh Museum.

Van Gogh Museum as a Symbol of Success

It is not possible to talk about the establishment of the Van Gogh Museum without mentioning Van Gogh’s sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. The museum was a mark of success culminating from years of efforts that Jo had put into making Van Gogh famous through exhibitions and sales. After the death of the artist in 1890, and of his brother Theo six months later, Jo was left with all of Vincent’s canvases, drawings, letters, and collection of works by other artists in her Paris apartment. She preserved these for years before they were officially owned by the Vincent van Gogh Foundation in 1962.

While Jo died in 1925, her son, Vincent Willem van Gogh, continued her work in order to preserve the memory of his uncle. He made an important decision to keep the remaining artworks within the family and cease any further sales. Eventually, he felt the need to preserve all of Van Gogh’s artworks under one roof, and the nephew made a deal with the Dutch state wherein all artworks were to be owned by the Van Gogh Foundation as state property and kept in a museum dedicated to Van Gogh.

The decision to open a museum was also rooted in the nephew’s desire to make Van Gogh’s art accessible for all to see. Previously, the paintings had only hung in the homes of families or in temporary exhibitions. Finally, the Van Gogh Museum was opened on the 2nd of June in 1973, by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, and Van Gogh’s works have been permanently displayed for public view ever since. Who would’ve thought that the artist who could not sell a single painting during his lifetime would have one of the most important Dutch museums dedicated to him?

Today, it is not only a world-famous tourist attraction but also a major center for research and education. The museum not only preserves Van Gogh’s artworks, but also his letters and other documentation that holds a wealth of information about his life. The institution has published several collection catalogs and digitally compiled, annotated, and translated all surviving letters that Van Gogh exchanged. The head office of the museum, along with the museum library, is located in a different building on the Gabriel Metsustraat, where curators and researchers develop new ways to enrich Van Gogh’s legacy.

Where Is It?

The Van Gogh Museum is located at Museum Square in Amsterdam, between two of the biggest Dutch museums—the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum. The Van Gogh Museum building has two parts, one designed by the Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld and the other by a Japanese architect named Kisho Kurokawa. The Rietveld building is where the permanent collection is housed. This is the building that takes you through the life of Van Gogh through his artwork and his relationship with his contemporaries.

The Kurokawa building is specifically used as a temporary exhibition space, which separates it from the permanent collection that is focused on Van Gogh alone. The separation of the two sections offers visitors the opportunity to explore both the permanent collection and follow the narrative of the temporary exhibitions without interruptions. You can always stop by their café or the gift shop after visiting one building and view the other one after a break.

Highlights From the Collection

Most of Van Gogh’s artworks are housed in the Van Gogh Museum, and the collection portrays a detailed narrative of his life. The first floor is dedicated to all the self-portraits by the artist throughout his artistic career, along with a timeline of his life. This room is incredibly interesting as it shows the development of Van Gogh’s style from realist, somber colors and smooth brushstrokes to bright hues and modernist brushwork after 1886, the year he spent in Paris learning about the modernist theories and techniques of art.

As you go up to each floor, a different period of Van Gogh’s life is on display. You see his first serious painting, The Potato Eaters, in the center of one of the rooms, always hidden behind a crowd of curious visitors. This painting requires a slow and patient observer who can unravel the details of this composition, shrouded in its dark color palette, such as the clock in the background and the features of the subjects.

As you move along your journey, you witness some of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, such as Sunflowers and Bedroom in Arles. These are big canvases, and the rooms are curated in a manner that attracts attention to these works. The period he spent in Arles between 1888-89 resulted in his most luminous works, such as The Harvest and The Yellow House, which is a pleasure to witness in this extensive collection. Apart from these masterpieces, Van Gogh’s repetitions of Japanese prints, from which he derived a lot of inspiration, are displayed alongside his original works. They offer a wonderful comparison of style and how the former influenced the latter. And finally, one of Van Gogh’s most special works, Almond Blossom, is also on display in this museum. It is a big canvas that demands attention from the entire room.

Despite being largely dedicated to one artist, the Van Gogh Museum displays a considerable number of artworks. This is because of the extremely productive career of Van Gogh, wherein he produced nearly 2,100 drawings and paintings in ten years. All these works were painted at different stages of his life, and the museum wonderfully takes you through them to unravel the evolution of his style, techniques, and perspectives on art. Every wall of the museum displays quotes from Van Gogh’s letters in both Dutch and English that beautifully summarize the period of his life that the paintings showcase in each room. In addition to art pieces, the Van Gogh Museum also displays drawings, letters, and even some of the painting supplies used by Van Gogh.

A Platform for Contemporaries

Apart from Van Gogh, the Van Gogh Museum displays paintings and drawings by some of his contemporaries. Both Vincent and Theo were avid collectors of art by their contemporary artists, and left behind this collection after they passed away. It included works by artists such as Edouard Manet, Adolphe Monticelli, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, George Hendrik Breitner, and Eugène Boch, among others.

The most important figure displayed in this category is Paul Gauguin, the French avant-garde artist who transformed the world of modernist art and deeply influenced Van Gogh. One particular painting by Gauguin, called The Painter of Sunflowers, is especially relevant. It is a portrait of Van Gogh painting one of the versions of the Sunflowers with a vase of sunflowers sitting in front of him. Van Gogh considered sunflowers as representative of his own oeuvre, and the reaffirming acknowledgment by Gauguin through this painting was a significant moment in their friendship.

At the same time, it was a point of tension between the two. Through this painting, Gauguin implied that Van Gogh only paints by imitating nature, as the latter can be seen copying the sunflowers in the vase. However, the version of the Sunflowers Van Gogh is painting in Gauguin’s portrait was painted from memory. This piece of history makes The Painter of Sunflowers a very interesting addition to the museum’s collection. It shows a nuanced view of Van Gogh’s relationship with Gauguin and their differing views on art.

Another artist in the collection is Emile Bernard, a younger but equally significant contemporary of Van Gogh and Gauguin. The museum displays certain works by Bernard, which he sent to Van Gogh with the title For Vincent’s Eyes Only. Drawings by Emile Bernard. This section offers a peek into the artists’ friendship as well as the works Bernard thought would be appreciated by Van Gogh. While Gauguin is considered Van Gogh’s closest artist friend, Bernard also worked alongside the two. In fact, in 1887, Van Gogh was learning to paint in the cloisonnist style of Bernard, which was characterized by flat tones placed alongside each other, sectioned off by bold outlines.

Bernard’s influence was significant in developing Van Gogh’s decorative paintings, and the influences of cloisonnism can be seen in the Sunflowers, Bedroom in Arles, and The Yellow House. The Van Gogh Museum also displays certain works by Edvard Munch, Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon, and Georges Seurat, among others. Including works by Van Gogh’s contemporaries in the collection offers a well-rounded view of the developments in the modernist era and how the Dutch artist shaped his style in this context.

Things to Do at the Van Gogh Museum

The Van Gogh Museum consistently organizes temporary exhibitions related to Van Gogh that focus on certain periods or people in the artist’s life. As the Van Gogh Museum is also an important modern art museum, it organizes exhibitions about artists from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. A recent exhibition at the museum titled ‘Vive l’impressionnisme!’ celebrated 150 years of Impressionism by displaying works by various Impressionist artists that are a part of Dutch collections. This included paintings, sketches, and sculptures by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Camille Pissarro, among others.

If you want to learn more about Van Gogh while you look at his artwork, the Van Gogh Museum offers 50-minute guided tours as well as private tours of the museum collection. A Van Gogh expert accompanies you through the museum and shares stories about his life and his work in great detail. These tours are excellent for art and culture enthusiasts or if you just want to immerse yourself in Van Gogh’s work and make the most of your museum visit. If you would rather explore the museum at your own pace, you can also book an audio tour online or at the front desk that takes you through Van Gogh’s life stories as you enjoy the paintings.

It’s always a good idea to book your tickets for the Van Gogh Museum at least a week in advance because it is a tourist favorite, and time slots for visitors fill up quickly. If you’re visiting Amsterdam with kids, you can also enroll them in a children’s workshop that the museum organizes regularly. Here, the children learn about the life of Van Gogh and can also unleash their creative side by painting their own masterpieces. These workshops last for a couple of hours, giving you plenty of time to browse the museum in the meantime.

Apart from that, the Van Gogh Museum also has a great collection of gifts at the museum shop, including books, catalogs, postcards, and prints, as well as a cafe where you can enjoy a cup of coffee or a meal during your visit. The museum is a must-visit site if you are in Amsterdam and want to experience the world of Vincent van Gogh.

One of the key figures of German Romanticism, ETA Hoffmann was not just a composer and music critic, but also an author and important innovator of tales of the fantastic, supernatural, and uncanny. Drawing on folkloric elements, childhood imaginings, and the deep workings of the subconscious, Hoffmann’s stories have profoundly shaped literary history since they first appeared in the early 19th century. Beyond that, they have provided inspiration for operas, ballets, films, and television shows. Here are five of his most compelling works.

1. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

Every Christmas, a ballet company somewhere is bound to be performing The Nutcracker. First performed in 1892, the ballet was a collaboration between Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and choreographer Marius Petipa. Tchaikovsky’s sugary score, Petipa’s delicate and dazzling set pieces, and the enchanting scenery (The Nutcracker was intended as a “ballet-féerie,” a subgenre of ballet that relies on spectacular visual effects) are all elements that capture the magic of ETA Hoffmann’s original short story, first published in 1816.

There are minor differences between Hoffmann’s story and Tchaikovsky’s ballet: the heroine is named Marie in the story and Clara in the ballet, while the ballet does not include a subplot from the story that details how the young prince was turned into a nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s and Petipa’s libretto was not based directly on Hoffmann’s story but on an 1844 adaptation by the French author Alexandre Dumas père. 

By and large, though, the ballet retains the essential components of Hoffmann’s story. On Christmas Eve, young Marie is given a nutcracker in the traditional shape of a soldier figurine by her imposing and mysterious godfather, Herr Drosselmeyer. More interested in his own toy soldiers, Marie’s brother Fritz accidentally breaks the nutcracker, but Drosselmeyer (who turns out to be a skillful toymaker) manages to do some remedial repairs, and Marie sets down the nutcracker to rest.

Overnight, she goes to check on the invalid and finds the house under attack by the terrifying, seven-headed Mouse King and his army of mice. The nutcracker, now grown to human size, defends Marie, backed by an army of gingerbread men and the children’s other toys, and Marie clinches the battle at the last moment by throwing her shoe at the Mouse King.

Tchaikovsky was drawn to The Nutcracker and the Mouse King because, characteristically for Hoffmann, it blurs the lines between reality and fantasy through the lens of childhood. In its young female heroine, Marie, the story celebrates childhood as a time of access to imaginative dreamscapes that, as adults, we long to recover.

The story emphasizes Marie’s ability to find magic in ordinary household objects such as the grandfather clock and the toy cabinet, and the adults’ insistence that she is only imagining things. Although the story employs a classic trope by consigning its most exhilarating moments to dreams, there is no moment when the author pulls away the curtain and definitively says: “It was only a dream.” There is no clear division, in Hoffmann’s writing, between the dream world and reality.

2. The Sandman

One of Hoffmann’s other best-known stories similarly fascinates readers because of its exploration of dreams and the unconscious. The Sandman is a truly terrifying story whose complexities, both psychological and literary, give it its power to surprise and entrance readers even today.

Beginning with a series of letters between the protagonist, Nathanael, his fiancée Clara, and Clara’s brother Lothair, the narrative soon unravels as the narrator (a friend of Lothair) interjects and confesses that he has contrived to open the story in a way “calculated to arrest your attention.” Henceforth, he promises, the story of Nathanael’s “ominous life” will get only more bizarre—but, he insists, it is all true, for “nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life.”

The opening letters establish that all through his childhood, Nathanael lived in fear of the Sandman, a character from folklore who is said to scatter sand onto our eyes as we fall asleep to help us sleep soundly and peacefully. Nathanael, though, associates the Sandman with having to leave his parents at night, and his fears are worsened by old wives’ tales about this evil visitor throwing sand into children’s eyes so that they will pop out and he can steal them. Worse still, he imagines that a lawyer friend of his father’s, Coppelius, is the Sandman in disguise—a grotesque figure whom Nathanael sees, one day, conducting a mysterious alchemical experiment. Surrounded by apparitions of eyeless faces, Coppelius pulls embers out of a furnace and hammers them into shape: “Eyes here! Eyes here!,” he cries, advancing on a terrified Nathanael before his vision (was it real or a hallucination?) ends.

Later in the story, an older Nathanael has moved away but is still so haunted by Coppelius that he becomes suspicious of a glasses merchant he meets called Coppola, who hawks his wares by shouting about “fine eyes.” Nathanael has also fallen in love with the daughter of Coppola’s friend Spallanzani, Olympia, a beautiful, accomplished pianist and singer, but responds stiffly and mechanically to his advances. As it turns out, Olympia is an automata created by Spallanzani with the help of Coppola. Finding the two men tussling over her, Nathanael discovers not only that Olympia is a doll but that Coppola is really Coppelius. As the fight ends with Olympia’s glass eyes falling out, Nathanael is dragged back into the psychic trauma of his childhood.

Hoffmann’s story has had an afterlife as vivid as the tale itself. Its exploration of women’s objectification through automata was especially suggestive for works of opera and ballet, which place women front and center whilst obliging them to perform mechanically. Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les contes d’Hoffmann (1851) used the plot of The Sandman for its first act, while the ballet Coppélia (1870), with music by Léo Delibes and libretto by Charles-Louis-Étienne Nuitter, borrowed names and the central conceit from Hoffmann’s tale.

The Sandman also caught the attention of Sigmund Freud, who offered a psychoanalytic reading in his 1919 essay The Uncanny. Though not the first to theorize about the uncanny (an unsettling sensation of simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity), Freud took up the suggestion of his predecessor, psychiatrist Ernst Jensch, that Hoffmann’s stories were a perfect literary case study of the phenomenon. Discussing the story’s eyes motif, which he understands as indicative of the Oedipus myth or castration complex, Freud calls Hoffmann “the unrivaled master of the uncanny in literature.”

3. Ritter Gluck

Hoffmann’s first published story was another uncanny tale and an early example of the doppelgänger in literature. While The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and The Sandman bear some imprints of Hoffmann’s musical pursuits, and indeed most of his stories involve music in some way, Ritter Gluck (1809) actually features a composer—or does it?

The narrator of Ritter Gluck meets a mysterious stranger in Berlin’s Tiergarten as the two listen to one of the orchestral performances that typically took place in such parks in the 19th century. They find they have a shared admiration for the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (whose middle name Hoffmann adopted as a sign of his own admiration) and Christoph Willibald Gluck.

The stranger gets the orchestra to perform the overture to one of Gluck’s operas, and the narrator suspects he must therefore be a Kapellmeister—a music-master employed to write and perform for a German church or court. But the stranger is given to sudden disappearances and is gone before the narrator can work out who he is and where he has come from.

They meet again, and the stranger laments the sorry state of the music scene in Berlin, where the orchestras neglect Mozart and, worse, ruin Gluck. He disappears again, and the narrator eventually finds him outside a theater where Gluck’s opera Armide is being performed. Promising to give the narrator a better rendition of the work, the stranger takes him to a curious house, where everything is furnished in an outdated style. The stranger performs a masterful and true-to-the-original version of Gluck’s overture and finally reveals—or claims—that he is Gluck.

Hoffmann’s story is set in 1809 when the real, historical Gluck had been dead for over twenty years. This might account for the outdated furnishings of the stranger’s house: perhaps he is Gluck’s ghost, lingering in his strangely unchanged surroundings. Or perhaps the stranger is just a Gluck aficionado, who convinces himself, because he can play his music so brilliantly, that he really is the composer—it is for the reader to decide.

4. The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr

One of Hoffmann’s most unusual works, the novel The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr was left unfinished on the author’s death in 1822. Its title pays homage to a similarly experimental novel, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). However, while Sterne’s work was a freewheeling take on the conventions of the Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, in which the protagonist narrates the story of their life from beginning to end (Tristram Shandy does not get to his birth until Volume Three), Hoffmann’s satire goes a step further: the protagonist proudly telling his life story is not a human, but a highly literate cat.

For much of Tomcat Murr, we are reading, as the title suggests, the life and opinions (he has many) of a cat named Murr, who has secretly learned to write by raiding the library of his owner, the magician Master Abraham. But, as the novel’s full title suggests, Murr has not used totally blank paper for his memoirs: we are reading The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper.

Murr’s memoirs are frequently interrupted—sometimes mid-sentence—by passages from Johannes Kreisler’s biography. Like the ghostly Gluck in Hoffmann’s earlier story, Kreisler is a Kapellmeister employed by a court to write music. The grouchy, eternally unfulfilled Kreisler’s sections of the novel tell of his unrequited yearning for a beloved muse, Julia, and the mistreatment he receives as a jobbing composer from society.

If this complex narrative structure and the inclusion of a proto-magical-realist literate cat were not innovative enough, Hoffmann’s novel contains another postmodern flourish. Johannes Kreisler was not just a character in Tomcat Murr, but featured in a series of earlier, semi-fictional writings about music that Hoffmann published under the title Kreisleriana (1813). Using Kreisler as a mouthpiece allowed Hoffmann to distinguish between his music criticism and more satirical, often scathing, pieces of writing about the contemporary music world.

Like the blurring of reality and fantasy in Hoffmann’s other works, the invention of Kreisler has both helped and hindered later critics and historians in understanding Hoffmann’s own life and opinions, since it is hard to draw a line between the author and his alter ego. Kreisler may have been fictional, but he seemed to many to embody the values of Romanticism so completely that his importance in literary and musical history is equal to that of his creator. The composer Robert Schumann was so inspired by Kreisleriana that he wrote a set of piano pieces under the same title, while a young Johannes Brahms styled himself as Johannes Kreisler (Schafer 1975, 119).

5. The Golden Pot

First published in 1814, the novella The Golden Pot is another work that displays Hoffmann’s remarkable capacity to include a host of stereotypical Romantic fairytale elements and, simultaneously, to work outside the parameters of form, style, and genre. Like The Sandman and Tomcat Murr, The Golden Pot employs an unusual structure, told as a series of twelve “vigils,” and features a metanarrative device: towards the end of the novella, the narrator becomes a character in the tale.

Magical touches abound in The Golden Pot, although unlike the other stories mentioned here, these are less suggestive of childhood fantasies or childhood trauma and more connected to traditions from folklore, mythology, and even alchemy and theology. There is a lovelorn student protagonist, Anselmus; an old apple-monger who turns out to be a witch; a mysterious archivist, Lindhorst, who turns out to be a salamander; and his daughter, Serpentina, with whom Anselmus falls in love. Set to work by Lindhorst transcribing ancient Arabic and Coptic texts, Anselmus is also tasked with not spilling a drop of ink on the originals, a task he succeeds in with the help of Serpentina.

As a fire snake, Lindhorst has been sent out from the mythical land of Atlantis. He can only return when he has succeeded in marrying off his three snake daughters to humans, bestowing at the same time their dowry: a golden pot. But when the apple-monger bewitches Anselmus with a magic mirror, he comes to believe that the salamander and Serpentina are not real and mistakenly splashes one of the ancient texts with ink. Lindhorst (or the salamander) takes revenge by imprisoning him in a tiny crystal bottle. Eventually, after a battle between the witch and salamander, all is well, with Anselmus and Serpentina finally ending up in Atlantis.

Just as The Sandman lent itself to operatic and balletic retellings, The Golden Pot is steeped in the theatrical culture of its time. Hoffmann was working as a music director in Dresden while he wrote the novella. During this time, he conducted Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which has similar themes of the protagonist undergoing trials to win the love of a magician’s ward. Hoffmann was also working on his own opera, Undine (premiered in 1816), which is similarly about an anthropomorphic woman-creature who gains immortality through the love of a human man. These touches, along with the apple monger with a magic mirror who recalls the witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (first published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812), make The Golden Pot a quintessential fairytale. Its idiosyncratic manner of telling, however, is pure Hoffmann.

Reference List:

Schafer, R. Murray (1975). E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Vincent van Gogh is best known for his bright, colorful paintings showing the night sky, sunflowers, and landscapes. Long before these vibrant canvases came somber, muted paintings inspired by realists such as Rembrandt and Jean-François Millet. These paintings, mostly painted in 1885 in Nuenen, are in stark contrast to the paintings he created in the last five years of his life, when he was on a path toward becoming a colorist. These works marked the beginnings of his career and built his technical knowledge on light and shadows.

1. Van Gogh’s “Loom with Weaver,” 1884

Van Gogh was familiar with several linen weavers in Nuenen and painted numerous works depicting them at work after 1883. One of the reasons for choosing this subject was to capture the complicated mechanism of the loom on canvas. This was especially difficult to do, as these weavers worked in small, dark rooms within their homes that admitted limited light. It was also not possible to stand at a distance to capture the machinery accurately.

Working with dedication on the looms in such cramped situations to earn a livelihood made Van Gogh see them with great respect and fascination. He would often visit their homes in Nuenen to study them. He made several drawings of weavers working, developing a strong connection with their community and an admiration for their technical and physical labor.

2. The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, 1884

Most of Van Gogh’s early works were created in the Dutch countryside. The artist had learned from the style of the Old Masters and sought to emulate it in his work before he was introduced to avant-garde circles in Paris during 1886-87. While living with his parents in Nuenen, Van Gogh often went into the countryside to explore natural and peasant subjects. This painting depicts an old church tower, almost in ruins, in the background. Van Gogh paid special attention to it in 1885, as it appears as the central subject in The Old Church Tower at Nuenen. The artist made several paintings and sketches of this parsonage garden to capture the effect of changing seasons.

This painting, belonging to the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, had an eventful history: it was stolen while on loan for an exhibition in 2020. It was retrieved in 2023 in fairly good condition but underwent a thorough investigation and restoration, and was finally displayed in an exhibition in 2024.

3. The Potato Eaters, 1885

The Potato Eaters was one of Van Gogh’s first major projects that he considered a real success. This oil painting was made in Nuenen, the Netherlands, in April of 1885. It depicts a peasant family having potatoes and coffee after a long day’s work in the field. Van Gogh held deep admiration for peasant life and people who performed difficult physical labor.

This is visible in his depictions of the figures at the dinner table. They have bony faces and fingers, which are enhanced in the composition through harsh shadows with a single source of light on top of the table. A serving of steaming potatoes sits at the center of the table with a few cups of coffee next to it. One of his greatest inspirations, the French artist Jean-François Millet, was famous for his peasant paintings, and Van Gogh attempted to follow in his footsteps by depicting the reality of peasant life, albeit in his own style.

This painting was not only a symbol of life in rural Netherlands, but also a technical achievement for Van Gogh. This painting was particularly difficult to compose because it required depicting five figures under a single oil lamp, and Van Gogh made numerous sketches in preparation. The purpose of selecting such a subject shows Van Gogh’s intention to prove that he was developing into a serious artist who could be a successful figure painter. Still, he received harsh criticism for his manner of representing the figures. Today, The Potato Eaters is on display at the Van Gogh Museum as one of his most famous works and an excellent example of his early style.

4. Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot), 1885

This woman, Gordina de Groot, belonged to the peasant family depicted by Van Gogh in The Potato Eaters. He painted several such portraits of the family members in the same manner, as they served as useful studies for him to practice figure painting, which he wanted to master. While many of his peasant paintings depicted people at work and documented the physical labor of their lives, these portraits with neutral backgrounds showed the simplicity of their clothing and the typical white headdresses worn by women.

In fact, these headdresses, worn by peasant women in the province of North Brabant in the 19th century, were one of the major compositional reasons Van Gogh was interested in making these portraits. The artist found that they formed a contrast that was both difficult to paint but looked beautiful against a dark, neutral background.

5. Still Life with Bible, 1885

Van Gogh was introduced to religion at an early age through his father, Theodorus van Gogh, a Protestant minister. The Bible depicted in this still life belonged to his father and it was painted as a kind of portrait after his death. Next to the Bible lies another book, La joie de vivre by Émile Zola, creating a stark contrast, as it represents Zola’s views, which were considered progressive for 19th-century French society. Van Gogh valued both religion and avant-garde thought, and Still Life with Bible depicts the duality of his views and the contrast between him and his father. Their strained relationship did not resolve, as his father rejected his son’s career choice as an artist, deeming it an unstable profession.

In terms of composition, this still life is a great example of Van Gogh’s early color palette. He uses dark colors throughout, including black to cover the entire background, with the white pages of the open Bible in the foreground, which is highlighted due to the contrast. Compared to his still life paintings made in Paris that display a juxtaposition of bright blues, yellows, pinks, and greens, the colors in Still Life with Bible are dark and muted, representing a somber emotion.

6. Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fireplace, 1885

This intimate scene of a woman cooking after a day of working in the fields fits perfectly into Van Gogh’s series of peasant paintings depicting their daily lives. Inspired by life in the countryside, the artist sought to depict its reality, however harsh, rather than presenting an idealized image of peasants. He valued this life for its simplicity and honesty, which is reflected in his paintings of these subjects.

Painted in Nuenen in 1885, Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fireplace depicts a particularly mundane aspect of everyday life. While it was already a well-established tradition to paint everyday activities of private life among other Dutch artists, such as Rembrandt and Vermeer, their works rarely focused on capturing the lives of the poorest communities. This, along with a style that captured the essence of his subjects, made Van Gogh stand apart artistically. The posture of the woman, the blaze of the fire, and the utensils lying around on the floor make this scene dynamic and real in a manner that could not be captured by an accurate depiction of each detail.

7. Basket of Potatoes, 1885

Van Gogh painted many still-life canvases. During his colorful phase, they mostly consisted of flowers, capturing the effect of bright colors placed next to each other. However, Basket of Potatoes is an example of how he captured a simple subject with great character. This still-life shows the use of multiple shades of brown. Van Gogh created the entire composition, including the surface, background, basket, and potatoes, using shades of the same color.

Van Gogh depicted light falling on the subject from above, with the potatoes’ shadows on the right side of the composition. The painting does not follow the traditional realist style, but Van Gogh still managed to capture small details, such as the imperfect weave of the basket, which brings the painting closer to the way reality is experienced. This is characteristic of the artist who intended to capture character and honest reality over an idealized image, regardless of the subject. Van Gogh continued painting the same subjects, depicting fruits and vegetables in baskets, plates, and bowls later in his career, but his approach to color and line shifted as he matured artistically.

8. Bird’s Nests, 1885

Even during his early phase, when Van Gogh was working with a darker, more somber color palette, his underlying desire to be a colorist was peeling through. He was particularly interested in painting Birds’ Nests, along with other compositions of the same subject, to capture the combination of natural colors, particularly the browns and greens. Being surrounded by nature all his life, first in the small town of Zundert in the south of the Netherlands and later in Nuenen and Etten-Leur in North Brabant, Van Gogh’s oeuvre at large revolved around it.

Even so, his works focused on the side of nature that was often overlooked. For example, in paintings of birds’ nests, rather than depicting young birds in the nest, he would gather nests around Nuenen that had been abandoned to avoid causing harm or disrupting the rhythm of nature.

9. The Old Church Tower at Nuenen, 1885

Before becoming an artist, Van Gogh aimed to join the church. He was deeply involved in religion and, as an artist, found ways to incorporate his faith into his work. Painted in June 1885, Van Gogh captures the essence of this old, abandoned church with gloomy colors, similar to the paintings of peasants whose connection to the earth was reflected in the dark palette of the composition. Next to this church tower lay a graveyard where peasants were buried. He had been planning to paint this tower since April of that year because it was scheduled for demolition.

This painting depicts the tower under a greyish-blue sky after its spire has already been removed. Van Gogh considered this painting successful enough to sign it, but was still unsure about its value. However, the artist composed this painting with colors that symbolize the fading of memory and life, embodied by the partially demolished church tower.

10. Van Gogh’s “Three Pairs of Shoes,” 1886-87

There are a total of six paintings of worn-out shoes that Van Gogh painted when he was visiting his brother Theo in Paris. He was particularly interested in painting still lifes from 1886 onward and used them to study color theory. Here, shoes that were worn by laborers in Paris act as their portraits, similar to how Still Life with Bible represents Van Gogh’s father.

Three Pairs of Shoes, depicting shoes arranged in pairs over a white cloth, is one of Van Gogh’s last paintings from his early phase, when he was still working in the traditional Dutch color palette. In Paris, after being introduced to Impressionists and other modern artists such as Georges Seurat and Paul Gauguin, he completely transformed his style to incorporate lighter and more vibrant colors.

One of Elsa Schiaparelli’s most iconic pieces is the Skeleton Dress (1938). Real bones and white silk hugged the woman’s curves. Ribs shaped her torso, and a spine rippled down the back. This piece was not just a dress; it was a vision, an entire story. At a time when couture was all about elegance and restraint, Schiaparelli turned it into visual storytelling, into art. Let’s explore Schiaparelli’s groundbreaking designs, feminist resonance, and enduring legacy revived today by Daniel Roseberry’s visionary reinterpretations.

Elsa Schiaparelli: Fashion’s Surreal Genius

Nicknamed fashion’s “mad genius,” Schiaparelli was the darling of 1930s Paris, a provocateur who moved easily among artists like Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Man Ray. They all shared the same visions about transformation, illusion, and they blurred the boundaries between reality and imagination.

However, Elsa Schiaparelli’s fashion went well beyond mere visions. Her art reimagined how a woman’s body could be treated; she did not just dress it or decorate it. In her hands, surrealism escaped the gallery and entered daily life. The question her work still poses is radical: how can fashion, that most intimate of arts, transform the body from an object into imagination itself?

Surrealism Meets Fashion: Paris in the 1930s

Paris in the 1930s was the place to be for the avant-garde scene. Surrealism, an avant-garde movement founded by André Breton, was on the rise at that time. In salons, ateliers, and cafés, Surrealists met and discussed ideas about challenging the perceptions of reality, dreams, the subconscious, eroticism, the inexplicable, and the bizarre. Elsa Schiaparelli fit right into this circle not as a visitor, but as a prominent figure. Under these influences, she managed to transform her ideas into wearable pieces of art.

The movement drew attention to automatism, juxtaposition, and the irrational. Furthermore, it explored erotic fantasies, ethereal dreamscapes, and disturbing visual associations. The male Surrealists depicted women as muses and objectified them. Even though Schiaparelli was deeply involved in the movement and its social circle, her approach towards women was completely different. She clearly understood Surrealism’s principles and applied them to the body, turning the female silhouette into a canvas of conceptual exploration.

She worked closely with many Surrealists to bring her visions to life. For example, Salvador Dalí painted lobsters on her gowns. Man Ray captured the fantastical universes of her designs, and Jean Cocteau designed dramatic motifs. Schiaparelli’s atelier became a cauldron boiling with ideas. She tested Surrealist philosophy with experiments on materials. Thus, zippers became statements, silk became an element of surprise, and garments became performative objects.

However, like any true artist, Schiaparelli drew inspiration from many sources, such as contemporary exhibitions and artworks. For instance, the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London left a huge mark on her. The exhibition presented shocking contrasts and disturbing sculptures that she would later introduce into her own designs. She was the only couturier of that time who could incorporate such eccentric surrealist elements into fashion and actually make it both wearable and intellectually provocative.

The Surreal Body: Schiaparelli’s Key Designs

Schiaparelli’s designs were the meeting point of surrealist art and fashion. The Lobster Dress (1938) is an iconic example of that. Dalí painted the lobster, an erotic symbol in the surrealist vocabulary, across the skirt of a simple evening gown made of silk. The dress transformed the body into something playful yet provocative. On the one hand, having a sea creature on a formal dress was something original and amusing. On the other hand, it was shocking, as Surrealism meant to be in all its notions.

In the same spirit, she created the Tears Dress. She rendered shimmering tears in embroidery and appliqué, from the top to the bottom of the dress. It was the designer’s own way to capture the fragility and the violence of this human state. Next, she made another shocking piece, the Skeleton Dress. That is, a dress with white silk stitching that outlines the human anatomy. Hence, the body itself becomes the ornament, the decoration that merges scientific precision and theatricality.

Another piece Elsa Schiaparelli created was iconic and surrealist to its core: The Shoe Hat (1937). Working with Dalí on the design, she basically turned footwear into headwear. It was her way to transform an everyday object into a wearable absurdity. Her Butterfly Dress (1938) had delicate wings printed or appliquéd onto the skirt. It evoked a sense of movement with metamorphosis, inviting the wearer to inhabit the delicate boundary between human and creature.

Schiaparelli embroidered and painted on silk, taffeta, and velvet with extra attention to detail. Every little thing on her garments was thoughtfully placed there. These designs are just a few examples of what she offered to the fashion and art world. Elsa transformed the female body into a canvas, ready to present surrealist concepts. Her persistence in intellectual engagement is what made her fashion so special and original. It proved that this art form was much more than just decoration and frivolity. It was a way to explore one’s identity, cultural inquiries, and psychological expeditions.

Redefining Femininity

Surrealism was generally a male-dominated movement, even though several female artists were part of its social circles. The male general consensus was that women were passive objects of desire. However, Elsa Schiaparelli actively opposed this predicament and treated women as they truly were: smart, intelligent, and beautiful in all possible and bizarre ways. Socialites and actresses of the time adored her creations and wore them constantly. They became Schiaparelli’s embodiments of theatricality and wit, and transformed the act of dressing up into a statement of empowerment. The dress itself became a performative act, challenging the boundaries of conventional femininity and beauty.

This transformation has been noticed by several scholars. Whitney Chadwick spoke of the female Surrealist artists and designers who, through humor, fantasy, and irony, restored the woman’s position. On a similar note, Xavière Gauthier explored how women critiqued and destabilized the male gaze using the Surrealist language. Thus, erotic imagery became a scene of female empowerment and self-determination. Both Chadwick and Gauthier made very accurate observations that applied to Elsa Schiaparelli; her work indeed reflects all these principles, as she reimagined the female body both as aesthetic pleasure, but for itself, no one else, and intellectual involvement.

These qualities were expanded through humour, spectacle, and theatricality. Her pieces provoked surprise, laughter, and curiosity, providing women with the chance to attract attention on their own terms. Once again, she redefined femininity as something other than passive or purely decorative. The woman who wore her designs became an active participant in an extensive discussion on fashion, art, and philosophy.

Reception and Cultural Impact

Elsa Schiaparelli’s designs were eccentric for their time. Naturally, this raised criticism, as not everyone understood Schiaparelli’s originality and boldness. Some said her creations were shocking but whimsical, while others said they were controversial and not elegant enough for the world of fashion. In popular magazines, such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, journalists and editors saw her audacity and praised her originality. At the same time, they wondered about the wearability of some of her theatrical pieces. The combination of Surrealism, humor, intellectuality, and impeccable tailoring earned her the title of fashion’s “mad genius,” capturing both admiration and awe.

The designer’s influence went well beyond Paris. Women of the high society, as well as cinema icons, such as Wallis Simpson and Marlene Dietrich, often wore Schiaparelli designs. The general public was quite fascinated too. They loved the Lobster Dress and the Shoe Hat, and they wanted to be part of the artist’s surrealist world. Moreover, museums and collectors acknowledged the innovative character of her garments. So, they began acquiring her clothes and preserving them as cultural artifacts and works of great artistic importance. Right from the start, Schiaparelli’s clothes were not made only for commercial purposes.

The critical discourse surrounding Schiaparelli also highlighted the gender dynamics of the fashion industry at the time. Male designers paid attention to technical skill and exotic elements. Schiaparelli, on the other hand, told a story. Of course, this made her both respected and scrutinized by her colleagues for breaking traditions. Yet no one can deny that she was acknowledged, even from the early stages of her career. Quickly, she became a prominent figure in the fashion world, a status that inspires to this day.

Reinvention: Schiaparelli Today

In the 21st century, her influence and reputation are still strong. This is evident in the reinvention of her fashion house under the creative direction of Daniel Roseberry. In 2019, when he took over, Roseberry resurrected the brand’s surrealist and theatrical DNA. His haute couture collections, especially Spring/Summer 2022 and Fall/Winter 2023, are characteristic of his ability to emulate Elsa Schiaparelli’s creative genius in the contemporary era.

Roseberry has revisited many of Schiaparelli’s original designs and transformed them into new, contemporary garments. To do so, he has used new materials and technologies. For example, while revisiting the Skeleton Dress, he created anatomical corsets and bone elements from gilded metal and bronze, giving a more robust feel to the design. Another recurring symbol of Schiaparelli that Roseberry revamped is the dove, a symbol of freedom and transformation. He created a bodice with a golden dove that Lady Gaga wore at the 2021 U.S. presidential inauguration, making it iconic.

The 2023 fashion show featured models wearing hyper-realistic animal heads inspired by Dante’s Inferno. It sparked a global conversation that echoed similar themes from Schiaparelli’s 1930s collections: shock, beauty, and playfulness. Therefore, Roseberry’s success lies in his ability to channel Schiaparelli’s surreal sensibility into contemporary designs. His personal interpretation revolves around the same dualities as Elsa Schiaparelli: discipline and delirium, humor and grandeur. In our time, fashion is becoming increasingly minimal, clean, and maybe even conceptual. Roseberry for Schiaparelli brings back the notion that fashion can be wearable sculpture too.

Elsa Schiaparelli’s Enduring Influence

Elsa Schiaparelli’s art remains relevant today because it reminds us that fashion is not just about attire. It is a means of empowerment and a cultural commentary. Her designs are testaments to an outlook that sees the female body as an actively engaged presence, occupying space in ways the owner wants, not as the male gaze usually sees it. Contemporary designers, most notably Daniel Roseberry, but also Iris van Herpen, and others, are inspired by Schiaparelli’s surrealist vision. In the end, Elsa Schiaparelli’s fashion was an audacious, intelligent, and playful assertion that the imagination need not remain confined to canvas, gallery, or text. She showed, decades ago, that the female body could be re-envisioned as art, spectacle, and story, a lesson that continues to inspire both wearers and creators alike.

Born in the small town of Zundert in the province of North Brabant, the Netherlands, Van Gogh grew up around nature. In his later years, he lived in other areas, such as Nuenen and Etten-Leur, surrounded by fields and gardens. The years spent here instilled in him a deep love of the land that lay the foundation for his art. Not only was he fascinated by nature itself, but also the people who worked closely with it. Continue reading to find out more about Van Gogh’s “Head of a Peasant.”

Before Van Gogh’s “Head of a Peasant”: The Borinage

Before becoming an artist, Van Gogh had decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the church. His father, Theodorus van Gogh, was a Protestant minister working in North Brabant. Van Gogh was a religious man and wished to dedicate his life to the service of God, which led him to work as a preacher in the mining village of Borinage in Belgium. This experience was transformative for him and guided him toward art and service to those in need, as he befriended miners living in extreme poverty and helped them whenever he could. He would share his own food and clothing with the families. However, failing at his work as a preacher, the church did not renew his contract, so Van Gogh left the Borinage in 1880.

In 1882, he wrote a letter to his brother Theo from The Hague recalling his experiences during the time he spent in the village: “Once I nursed a poor burnt miner for six weeks or 2 months—I shared my food with an old man a whole winter long . . . But to this day I don’t believe that this was foolish or bad, I see it as so natural and self-evident that I can’t understand how people can be so indifferent to each other normally.” Van Gogh’s attentiveness to people leading difficult lives stemmed from his religious inclinations. He carried this dedication into his life as an artist, particularly as a peasant painter.

Life in North Brabant

After the stay in Borinage, Van Gogh had to leave the church, which led him to move back in with his parents in Nuenen. He had already decided to become an artist and had set up his studio at the back of his parents’ house. This was not easy because Van Gogh’s relationship with his parents became strained after he was rejected from the church. His decision to become an artist heightened the tension, as earning a living in this profession was difficult, which his parents found disappointing. However, Van Gogh was determined to follow this path, even if it meant living in poverty. He relied on his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, for financial support throughout his life as an artist.

Nuenen provided an ideal setting for Van Gogh to develop his practice as a peasant painter. He wrote in April 1885, “After all, I desire nothing other than to live deep in the country and to paint peasant life.” He also wrote: “I’ve become so absorbed in peasant life by continually seeing it at all hours of the day that I really hardly ever think of anything else.” Due to the rural environment of Brabant, there was no shortage of subject matter to sketch or paint, and Van Gogh took advantage of this.

He would go out in search of working peasants to draw or paint them, such as Peasant Woman Digging and Woman Lifting Potatoes. Apart from peasants, he also befriended several weavers in the region who worked on looms inside their small houses. Van Gogh sketched and painted numerous works depicting the weaver at work, capturing the complicated structure of the loom impressively. Together, peasants and weavers form the majority of his works from Nuenen, as he also hinted in a letter from January 1884 to Theo, “I don’t think there’s been a day since I’ve been here when I haven’t sat working with the weavers or peasants from morning till night.”

By the time he was in Nuenen, the artist not only aspired to paint the reality of peasant life, but also hoped to develop himself as a figure painter. Painting peasants working in the fields enabled him to capture the proportions of the human body as well as the complexities of their movements. In 1885, Van Gogh painted his first large-scale painting depicting a family of peasants sitting around a small table with steaming potatoes and coffee, titled The Potato Eaters. He considered this work a personal success. Today, The Potato Eaters is in the permanent collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and is considered one of Van Gogh’s first masterpieces.

Head of a Peasant (Woman)

To prepare himself to undertake the project of painting The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh made numerous studies of the peasant family. These included sketches of the scene depicted in the painting and portraits of individual family members. These paintings, which also allowed Van Gogh to improve his skills in portraiture, depict the subject in front of a dark background in plain clothing.

The portrait titled Head of a Peasant Woman (Gordina de Groot) was described by Van Gogh as “simply a peasant woman who came back from planting potatoes, still covered in dust from the field.” The painting has a rustic character that does not idealize the woman; instead, it focuses on the reality of her life as someone who performs difficult physical labor and lives in poverty.

Van Gogh held strong opinions about such depictions, as he wrote in a letter, “For my part, I’m convinced that in the long run it produces better results to paint them in their coarseness than to introduce conventional sweetness.” He went on to describe the beauty of a peasant woman over a lady, as well as the importance of honest representations over depicting a ‘perfect’ version of peasant life: “If a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam—fine . . . But a peasant painting mustn’t become perfumed.” The artist expressed his intention to paint 50 peasant heads in Nuenen in multiple letters. In total, 47 such paintings survive today, affirming the artist’s dedication to the subject. However, these portraits were not intended to capture individual identities but to represent types.

Van Gogh did not discuss his subjects as individuals in his letters, but always referred to them as ‘peasants’ because he wanted to capture their very character as people who work on the earth: “They remind one of the earth, sometimes appear to have been modelled out of it.” This characterization of the peasants may be why none of the people in the portraits are known, except Gordina de Groot.

Artistically, the peasant portraits from Nuenen were a crucial step in Van Gogh’s development as a figure painter. This was a challenging skill to master, and the artist even enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, to deepen their technical knowledge of figure painting. Drawing heads of peasants was particularly helpful for him as he could exaggerate their facial features to signal the effect of their daily physical labor in the fields. He described them as belonging to “the old Brabant stock through and through.” In Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot), the lines on the peasant woman’s face, as well as the angles, are highlighted by playing with shadows along with using a muted, somber color palette dominated by shades of browns and greens.

Further, the artist considered the white headdresses worn by Brabant women in the 19th century both a challenge to paint, but he also found them visually interesting because they created a beautiful contrast to the dark background: “It’s precisely the chiaroscuro—the white and the part of the face in shadow, that has such a fine tone.” Van Gogh had already started experimenting with color theory while painting these heads. The white headdresses of the peasant women are not painted white; they contain shades of dark green, appearing white only due to the contrast with the dark background. This play of colors is particularly visible in two other paintings titled Head of a Woman, one depicting an older member of the De Groot family and another depicting a woman seated in front of a window.

Both portraits are darker than that of Gordina de Groot, which shows how skillfully Van Gogh employed color theory in the work. The woman seated in front of a window is especially complex as the artist managed to depict her facial features and the white headdress in front of a lighter background. He employed a color resembling “dark green soap” that he had used to describe an interior scene he had witnessed in a cottage in Nuenen. Not only did the dark color palette of these portraits serve to emphasize the connection between the land and the peasants, but it was also the only palette he was familiar with through his exposure to the art of the Old Masters.

Impressionism had established its position in Paris, but its impact was not as well known beyond the city. Van Gogh was familiar with the emergence of new ideas in painting, but had not witnessed these ideas in motion until he left for Paris in 1886. Nevertheless, his choice of earth tones adds symbolic value to the peasant paintings.

This practice of instilling symbolism through color is also evident in works from later in his career, such as the Sunflowers, which use vibrant shades of yellow to symbolize the sun. This intentional choice of subjects and their colors is what makes Van Gogh’s art stand out today. His paintings are highly recognizable because they do not depict perfection but rather a strong character, captured through color and line that embody the essence of the subject.

Van Gogh’s Goodbye to the Netherlands

After spending nearly two years in Nuenen, Van Gogh moved to Antwerp, never to return to the Netherlands again. He hoped to sell his work, experience the city’s rich culture, and enroll in the art academy to study figure painting. In a few short months, he moved to Paris to live with his brother. This period revolutionized his art and transformed his palette from the dark, earthy tones of Brabant to the luminous colors of the Impressionists. Despite this experience of vibrant urban culture, the artist longed for the rural life he had left behind in Brabant.

He wrote to Theo in 1885, “I so often think that the peasants are a world in themselves, so much better in many respects than the civilized world.” Eventually, Van Gogh’s longing for the countryside led him to the south of France and later to Auver-sur-Oise, where he was surrounded by the simplicity and honesty of peasant life once again.