The Public Domain Review

Of all the caricatures of Napoleon Bonaparte, representations of the French emperor as a miniscule megalomaniac continue to haunt the historical imagination to an unparalleled degree. Peter W. Walker searches for the origins of “Little Boney” in the early 19th-century caricatures of James Gillray, the English illustrator who took Napoleon down a peg by diminishing his reputation and scale to the point of absurdity.

An uncanny collection of folk tales written and illustrated by Sigmund Freud’s niece.

An uncanny collection of folk tales written by Sigmund Freud’s niece.

Haunted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, these visualisations of proverbs look backward to uncertain origins.

Photographs of tattoos by Sutherland Macdonald, Victorian England’s first professional tattoo artist.

What can we learn from observing the progression of spring — a hawthorn’s first flowering, the return of birdsong on a particular day? Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores the lifelong calendrical project of Robert Marsham, the Norfolk naturalist considered Britain's first phenologist.

Set of spectacular engravings of insects and their floral abodes — one of the first natural histories of Suriname.

Britain's first clay animation film imagines a malleable substance spontaneously giving rise to manifold forms.

An English translation of an influential 16th-century Italian etiquette guide. Its proposition is simple but difficult to get right: politeness is the art of pleasing others.

When Georgiana Houghton first exhibited her paintings at a London gallery in 1871, their wild eddies of colour and line were unlike anything the public had seen before — nor would see again until the rise of abstract art decades later. But there was little intentionally abstract about these images: Houghton painted entities she met in the spirit regions. Viewing her works through the prism of friendship, loss, and faith, Jennifer Higgie turns overdue attention on an artist neglected by historians, a visionary who believed that death was not the end, merely a new distance to overcome.