The Public Domain Review

The nineteenth-century images collected here concern hatha yoga, the yoga of physical discipline.

This month marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Baudelaire’s birth, the French poet famous for his descriptions of the flâneur: a man of the crowd, who thrived in the metropolis’ multitude. Following Baudelaire through 19th-century Paris, Matthew Beaumont discovers a parallel archetype — the convalescent hero of modernity — who emerges from the sickbed into city streets with a feverish curiosity.

Gathering over 500 prints, paintings, illustrations, sketches, photographs, doodles, and everything in between, Affinities is a carefully curated journey exploring echoes and connections across more than two millennia of visual culture.

Images from Agostino Ramelli's Diverse and Artificial Machines, which despite their detail obscure as much as they reveal.

John Martin Crawford's translation of a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology.

Toward the end of World War I, as the US peddled hard its Liberty Bonds for the war effort, goldfish dealer Franklin Barrett bred a stars-and-stripes-colored carp: a living, swimming embodiment of patriotism. Laurel Waycott uncovers the story of this “Liberty Bond Fish” and the wider use of animals in propaganda of the time.

In his final work, William Fairfield Warren set out to become a cartographer of the poetic imagination, mapping Milton’s cosmos in Paradise Lost.

Composed in numbered squares, six to a page, these images are colourful and complex odes to marble.

Engorged with bons mots and brimming with pith, this investigation, in its author’s own words, moves between “the hot sword-play of polemic” and “the chill spade-work of research”.

During the summer of 1895, in a Brooklyn park, there was a cotton plantation complete with five hundred Black workers reenacting slavery. Dorothy Berry uncovers the bizarre and complex history of Black America, a theatrical production which revealed the conflicting possibilities of self-expression in a racist society.