The Public Domain Review

The diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, published after her death from tuberculosis aged just 25, won the aspiring painter the fame she so longed for but failed to achieve while alive. Sonia Wilson explores the importance of the journal — one of the earliest bids by a woman to secure celebrity through curation of “personal brand” — and the shape it gave to female ambition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Controversial early photograph of a battle site during the Crimean War, taken by the British artist Roger Fenton.

Strikingly modern self-portraits by a French painter whose fixation on his own physiognomy has made his paintings readymade material for internet memes.

Early anthology of English alchemical texts, including by Geoffrey Chaucer among others, accompanied by charts and illustrations.

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For all its transcendental appeals, art has always been inextricably grounded in the material realities of its production, an entwinement most evident in the intriguing history of artists' colours. Focusing in on painting's primary trio of red, yellow, and blue, Philip Ball explores the science and stories behind the pigments, from the red ochre of Lascaux to Yves Klein's blue.

Artful, detailed maps of the Mississippi’s meander belt created by US geologist and cartographer Harold Fisk.

Eighteenth-century images of the guillotining of King Louis XVI, which came to represent the changing nature of the French Revolution.

Douglass' famous anti-slavery oration, one of the most important speeches in the history of the United States.

American fiction of the 19th century often featured a ghoulish figure, the cruel doctor, whose unfeeling fascination with bodily suffering readers found both unnerving and entirely plausible. Looking at novels by Louisa May Alcott, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville, Chelsea Davis dissects this curious character.