The Public Domain Review

A year before his death, the artist Howard Pyle set off for Italy, leaving unfinished on his Delaware easel his final painting The Mermaid — a profoundly haunting work of art.

These two treatises detail the art of leaf preservation through “skeletonization”.

On September 15, 1885, twenty-five years after his capture in Sudan, Jumbo the elephant tragically died when struck by a freight train. Ross Bullen takes us on a spectral journey through other collisions between elephant and machine — in adventure novels, abandoned roadside hotels, and psychic science — revealing latent anxieties at the century’s turn.

Like the substance itself, which binds to all kinds of grime, soap bubbles make for sticky symbols, assuming disparate associations — from innocence to vanitas, physics to politics — in the history of visual art.

Hand-coloured plates of “the utmost fidelity” for William Hamilton's documentation of the late-eighteenth-century eruptions of Mount Vesuvius.

The future’s bombs, this training film produced by the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory claims, will be detonated atop the shoulders of yesterday’s “photographer extraordinary”, Eadweard Muybridge.

Described by Kasimir Malevich as the “first step of pure creation in art”, his Black Square of 1915 has been cast as a total break from all that came before it. Yet searching across more than five hundred years of images related to mourning, humour, politics, and philosophy, Andrew Spira uncovers a slew of unlikely foreshadows to Malevich's radical abstraction.

This text is less a Victorian astronomy primer than the foundation for a phenomenological star wisdom.

A mixture of intimate journal entries, miscellaneous engravings, and sixteen chromolithographs — a unique, often surreal, retelling of life on the ice.

Our Mid-Year Fundraiser is launched, and the new postcards theme will be Air.