What would make a 52-year-old woman sell 255 of her own paintings, board a ship with only her daughter for company, and sail to a rainforest on the other side of the Atlantic? For Maria Sibylla Merian, the answer was simple: she needed to study insects. 

Decades before the birth of cinema, a Belgian physicist built a spinning disc that convinced the human eye it was watching motion. That device, invented in late 1832, was the phenakistoscope, and it remains one of the earliest true forerunners of animation and cinema. Today we're taking a closer look at how it worked and examining some beautiful examples.

What does it take to become the most celebrated flower painter in Europe, raise ten children, and still be producing masterworks in your eighties? Read on to find out more about Rachel Ruysch, one of the Dutch Golden Age’s most remarkable artists. 

Martin Schongauer, an engraver and painter from Colmar, was an incredibly talented and accomplished artist. One of his fans was none other than Albrecht Dürer, who collected his work, and Giorgio Vasari, an Italian Renaissance painter, architect, art historian, and biographer, also reported that Michelangelo copied one of his engravings. Today we'll learn more about his work, and how his technical innovations helped create his legacy. Let's go!

We may consider animal painting as a minor tributary of art history, something decorative, a background element. D’Hondecoeter invites us to look carefully at other creatures, to resist the habit of treating them as a background or supporting characters, and to find in their behaviour something that reflects our own. 

Hendrick Goltzius was a Dutch engraver and painter whose astonishing technical skill shaped the work of his contemporaries and generations beyond. Today, we’ll look closely at two of his signature engraving techniques, the swelling line and the dot and lozenge method, exploring how they work, why they matter, and studying some beautiful examples along the way.

Today we're looking at five iconic examples of protective imagery in art history and its lasting influence on artists and designers.

Grisaille comes from the French gris, meaning grey. It refers to artworks made entirely in shades of black and grey, or in a narrow range of neutral tones. You’ll find the technique across manuscripts, panel paintings, and decorative schemes from the Middle Ages onward. Artists used it to imitate carved stone, to separate sculptural forms from full-colour scenes, or to map out the tonal structure of a composition before colour was added. Today, we’ll look at a few examples of this technique in practice and explore what artists can learn from it.

In the quiet corners of libraries, rare book rooms, and private collections, a few volumes hide a strange and unsettling secret. These innocent-looking, often beautiful books were bound with pigments so toxic they still pose a risk more than a century later. What was once considered tasteful design has become something closer to hazardous material. In this article, we're diving into the eerie history of arsenic-laced books—how they came to be, why they were so popular, and the modern-day conservators trying to track them down. Let's go!