Isabella Stewart Gardner was a force to be reckoned with. She routinely went toe-to-toe with major museums and titans of industry to purchase masterpieces, she created a museum unlike any other, and she was famous for flouting the social conventions that governed women of her time. This book, however, shows another side of Isabella that readers may not expect: her love of dogs. Featuring black-and-white images from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum archives, this volume allows readers to meet Isabella's favorite dogs (Kitty Wink and Patty Boy), see the litters of puppies she bred, and discover how her dogs were a source of comfort to her toward the end of her life. Usually stern in photographs, Isabella--like many people--could not help grinning when posing for photos with puppies. Whether it was collecting Renaissance masterpieces or raising Fox Terriers, this book shows that Gardner approached all aspects of life with enthusiasm and dedication.

"This book takes you through the collection gallery by gallery, illuminating the art and installations in each room"--From preface.

A pathbreaking history of art that uses digital research and economic tools to reveal enduring inequities in the formation of the art historical canon Painting by Numbers presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to chart, for the first time, the sheer scale of nineteenth-century artistic production. With new quantitative evidence for more than five hundred thousand works of art, Diana Seave Greenwald provides fresh insights into the nineteenth century, and the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited—and potentially biased—sample of artwork from that time. She addresses long-standing questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and empire on the art world, and she models more expansive approaches for studying art history in the age of the digital humanities. Examining art in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greenwald features datasets created from indices and exhibition catalogs that—to date—have been used primarily as finding aids. From this body of information, she reveals the importance of access to the countryside for painters showing images of nature at the Paris Salon, the ways in which time-consuming domestic responsibilities pushed women artists in the United States to work in lower-prestige genres, and how images of empire were largely absent from the walls of London’s Royal Academy at the height of British imperial power. Ultimately, Greenwald considers how many works may have been excluded from art historical inquiry and shows how data can help reintegrate them into the history of art, even after such pieces have disappeared or faded into obscurity. Upending traditional perspectives on the art historical canon, Painting by Numbers offers an innovative look at the nineteenth-century art world and its legacy.

Cassoni is the Italian word for the chests, painted with scenes from myth and literature, central to upper-class weddings of the 15th century. This book includes essays, which shed light on the meaning of cassoni through informative discussions of Renaissance wedding rituals, male-female relations and daily domestic life.

Dog's Life columnist Holly Winter has just landed a plum contract to write a book on Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge's legendary pre-World War II dog shows. Holly arranges to interview one of the last living participants in those fabulously opulent and exclusive shows: canine fancier B. Robert Motherway. But there's something decidedly unsettling about the gracious old gent's imposing home with its acres of kennels. His dying wife wails piteously in an upstairs room, his servants are his sullen son and his downtrodden daughter-in-law, and his favorite German shepherd dog has an ill-bred snarl. Meanwhile, Holly's mail is laced with anonymous packages-old photographs, letters in German, and a brochure on pills for listless pooches. Nothing makes sense until a garroted body is found in a nearby cemetery. Suddenly Holly and her Alaskan malamutes, Rowdy and Kimi, are on a seventy-year-old trail of deception, decadence, and death. And either they unearth the skeletons or join them. From the Paperback edition.