The Public Domain Review

After supposedly stealing 500,000 francs from his bank, the mysterious Victor Dubreuil (b. 1842) turned up penniless in the United States and began to paint dazzling trompe l’oeil images of dollar bills. Once associated with counterfeiting and subject to seizures by the Treasury Department, these artworks are evaluated anew by Dorinda Evans, who considers Dubreuil’s unique anti-capitalist visions among the most daring and socially critical of his time.

James Ensor's etchings of the seven deadly sins stage personal grievances and caricatures through grotesque, Christian symbolism.

This forgotten monograph puts forward a novel theory: that frost is able to make “ice photographs”, expressing the form of objects near it.

These manuscript illustrations from the 1400s raise a historically vexing question: did men and women really duel to settle judicial disputes?

A mechanical device, designed to keep foxes away from pheasants, which opens onto a story about American gamekeeping in the early twentieth century.

Like fast food and snacks, the short story has been derided as minor cuisine, ephemeral and insubstantial, light fare compared to the novel’s sustenance. For Katherine Mansfield, a great master of the form, eating offered a model for the sensuous consumption of her fiction — stories, in turn, that are filled with scenes of alimentary pleasure. On the centenary of the New Zealand writer’s death, Aimée Gasston samples her appetites.

This reference manual for commercial bakeries includes striking pasted-in silver bromide prints and dazzling chromolithographs of bread.

Created sometime around 1889 by Beatrice and Walter Crane, this illustrated series of poems personifies the months of the year as women.

Each January 1st is Public Domain Day, where a new crop of works have their copyrights expire and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose.

From a 1904 study of queer Berlin to the mysteries of a hole-punched archive, a rundown of the ten most read pieces we published this year.