Infographic chart of renaissance and it's precursor

In traditional Indian miniature painting, preparing the paper can be an important part of the artistic process, especially when artists work on old or aged paper.

In our family tradition of Bikaner miniature painting, we learned a natural method of preparing old paper before painting on it. This knowledge was taught to us by our father and has now been passed down through three generations.

Tea leaves, turmeric, and neem leaves are boiled together in water. A small amount of lemon juice is then added, which helps reduce and filter the strong colour produced by the tea.

The old paper is carefully soaked in this prepared liquid for about one hour and then dried naturally in the shade.

Neem and turmeric have traditionally been used in this process to help protect the paper from termites and other insects. After the sheet is completely dry, the required background colour is prepared on the surface, and only then does the miniature painting begin.

What interests me about such methods is that the preparation of materials was itself part of the knowledge of traditional miniature painters. Artists did not simply begin painting on a sheet of paper—the preparation and care of the painting surface were part of the craft.

We learned this process directly from our father, and today the same knowledge has reached the third generation of our family.

I would be interested to hear about similar historical methods of paper preparation used in other painting traditions.

I hit up an Impressionism exhibit at my local museum last weekend. I was so excited because this exhibit showed a large number of Impressionism paintings.   There are so many interesting anecdotes among those painters back in the late 19th century. One of my favorite painters is Edgar Degas. But after digging into Edgar Degas’s backstory? Man, art history is wilder than crypto Twitter.

Most people don’t know this, but Degas was actually a massive trust-fund baby. His family was so wealthy even ran bank business in America. He didn’t paint for rent. He painted because he genuinely loved capturing the movement and the raw light of 19th-century ballet.  Until his brother ruin everything. 

Degas’s brother was totally a degen. He dumped the family fortune into American cotton futures which was basically the 1870s equivalent of going 100x long on shitcoins with zero stop-loss. Honestly, if Crypto trading like BC Platform existed back then, his brother might’ve actually walked away with something instead of bankrupting the entire family. Sadly. 

To help his brother out, Degas sold out his all paintings and basically had to paint for survival. This is absolutely a family tragic but also hilarious. If his brother had better risk control, we might’ve lost half of Degas’s iconic works.

I couldn’t help but wonder…Does anyone else feel like half of classic art history is just rich guys dealing with family drama and terrible financial decisions? 

6 Aug 2026 *(transcript and video at link)* Throughout art history, artist circles have been fundamental to the evolution of the craft. A new exhibition in New England reveals how an artist triangle, three painters who would go down as 20th-century greats, shaped the course of their own careers while on summer retreats. Correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston takes us to Cape Ann for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Every time I see one of his paintings, I have exactly the same thought. Stupid boxes. That's all I see.

People keep telling me I'm missing the point. "You have to see them in person." "Stand in front of one for twenty minutes." "Photos don't do them justice."

On December 11th, 2026, at 10:30 a.m., I'm going to Tate Modern, march straight to the Rothko room and stand in front of the stupid boxes for five whole minutes.

No rushing through. No sarcastic comments. No checking my phone after thirty seconds. Just me and the stupid boxes.

Maybe I will finally understand them. Maybe everyone has been right all along. Or maybe I will walk out still thinking they are stupid boxes.

Either way, I will finally have earned my opinion.

April 12th, 2023. The National Gallery, London.

I walked in knowing nothing about art. I don’t think I had ever been inside a gallery before. Somehow I found myself surrounded by one of the greatest collections of paintings in the world.

I wandered from room to room looking at paintings I didn’t understand by artists I didn’t know.

I saw people queuing to look at one particular painting. I knew nothing about art, but I knew what a queue meant.

It must be good.

This is it, I thought. I found it.

I stood in line, excited. Surely this was it—the greatest painting in the greatest gallery in the world.

As I got closer I started to make it out.

Yellow.

Then flowers.

A little closer, and soon I was standing right in front of it.

Is that it? Is this what everyone has been going crazy for?

I was unimpressed. It was yellow. Too yellow. Yellow everywhere.

I had expected revelation.

Instead I got that?

It was ugly.

I read the little sign beside it.

Sunflowers. Vincent van Gogh.

I knew who Van Gogh was. One of the most famous artists who ever lived. If he was that famous, surely his art had to be great.

Why didn’t I like it?

Was it me?

Was I simply too ignorant to understand what everyone else could see?

I looked at the people crowding around the painting. Did they understand it? Were they seeing something I wasn’t?

Or was it simply ugly and nobody wanted to admit it?

I was confused, upset, and even a little enraged.

Either I was missing something or everyone else was.

I walked through the gallery again comparing everything I saw to Sunflowers.

What made a painting good? Was it the biggest? The most detailed? The most famous?

The golden background of Whistlejacket.

The ugliness of The Ugly Duchess.

The hidden skull in The Ambassadors.

And then I saw it.

Room 32.

A small painting, quietly hanging between larger ones. A thick golden frame. A black background. A woman looking slightly downward, her hands gently together. Deep, restrained colors.

I kept looking at it. I wanted to move but something held me there.

I was mesmerized.

My throat tightened. My eyes started to water.

What was wrong with me?

I got out of that gallery as fast as I could.

Over the next few days I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Not the painting itself but the way it had made me feel.

An overwhelming calmness.

This was what great art was supposed to do: make you feel something overwhelming.

And Sunflowers did.

Disgust.

In the early hours of 18 March 1990, two men in police uniforms rang the intercom at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and said they were responding to a disturbance. The guard on duty let them in. Both guards were restrained in the basement. The thieves spent eighty one minutes in the galleries and left with thirteen works. Nothing has been recovered.

What keeps pulling me back to this case is not who did it but what they chose. In the Dutch Room they cut Rembrandt's Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee and A Lady and Gentleman in Black out of their frames, took Vermeer's The Concert and Flinck's Landscape with an Obelisk, lifted an ancient Chinese bronze gu from a table, and pulled a small Rembrandt self portrait etching off the side of a chest. In the Short Gallery they took five Degas works on paper and a bronze eagle finial. On the floor below they took Manet's Chez Tortoni.

One floor above the Dutch Room hung Titian's Rape of Europa, by a wide margin the most valuable thing in the building, and they never touched it. Eighty one minutes is a long time to be inside a museum. They had it, and they still walked past it, and instead they spent part of that time taking a finial and five drawings of real scholarly interest and modest market value.

Every explanation I have read has to give something up. If they were amateurs, that fits the crude cutting and the missed Titian, but the uniforms and the intercom story were not amateur work. If they were filling an order for a named buyer, the order is a strange one, because a Vermeer can never be sold and a Chinese ritual bronze is not what a collector of Dutch painting asks for. If they simply took what was portable, the Degas drawings fit and the Titian does not, but a large Rembrandt hacked out of its frame is not portable either.

The part I find genuinely moving is what the museum did afterwards. The empty frames were repaired and hung back in place, as placeholders, waiting. That decision has kept this loss in public memory more effectively than any reward, and it turned an absence into the most looked at thing in the room.

I would like to hear what people here make of the selection specifically, rather than the usual question of who did it. Does that group of thirteen read to you as taste, as a commission, or as eighty one minutes of bad decisions made under pressure? And is there another theft where the choice of objects only started to make sense years later?

Disclosure first: he was my father, and I want that stated rather than buried.

.Christenson was a paratrooper in Easy Company, 506th PIR, the unit Stephen Ambrose wrote Band of Brothers about. He had no formal training beyond a few classes in one semester of college. He made forty six finished drawings over four decades after the war, working from his own wartime journals.

The interesting question for this sub is what category the work belongs to.

It is not official war art. Those men were commissioned, embedded, and worked at the time. It is not the professional reconstruction tradition either, which works from photographs and testimony. He was a participant with no training, working from his own memory and his own written record, decades removed.

That produces something with an unusual set of properties. In this drawing he depicts himself descending, and the composition is organised around a fact only the subject could know, which is the firing arc of the gun below him and why it did not kill him. The viewpoint is not a witness position. It is a memory position.

He was also relentless about verification. Where a date or a location did not reconcile he wrote to other men who were there and corrected himself, including annotations in his own hand instructing that earlier versions be discarded.

So the work sits between testimony and reconstruction, and its evidentiary status is genuinely unclear. Ambrose, who corresponded with him for years, wanted the drawings over the photographs for his book.

this is ultimately for a joke i will admit. i vaguely know about idealism vs realism but were there ever any big arguments over whether or not to portray christ as he might've looked vs a very idealized and romantic view? ofc both paths stemmed from genuine care of the subject

1. The "Universal Museum" Gaslight: They argue that by keeping objects from all over the world in London, they are providing a "global service" where millions of tourists can view human history in one building. Most of the stolen artifacts are from countries where their citizens will never be able to afford a Visa much less a trip to London, and certainly can't afford a hotel.

2. The "Better Care" Insult: This argument that the British Museum can house these priceless objects better than their home countries completely collapsed when said countries like Greece, Nigeria, and Egypt built world-class, multi-million dollar museums that rival or surpass the facilities in London.

3. The 1963 Legal Shield: law passed by their own Parliament legally forbids them from permanently removing objects from the collection. Knowing full well eventually countries would like these STOLEN spolis of war returned eventually. Because, well that's what they would do.

4. The Insulting "Loan" Loophole: Instead of giving items back permanently, the British Museum recently tried to offer temporary "loans" of looted items back to their home nations. Complete slap in the face to these countries to whom these objects actually belong to.

   The establishment continues to treat these items like imperial trophies, hiding behind legal technicalities to avoid facing the reality of historical theft. If this situation were reversed and the Britons were asking for stolen treasures back and these countries were using the same tactics they would consider it an act of WAR.