Édouard Manet’s Le Fumeur (The Smoker) was unveiled at Mia in 1968 by Anthony Clark, then director of the museum. A solitary person with a pipe was sort of a 19th-century meme, and  Manet made various drawings and etchings of his subject, a  comfortably bewhiskered man believed to be his neighbor, that have circulated widely—they’re in the collections of  ...

They were among the first works to enter Mia’s collection, four large-scale female allegories of the Four Elements (from left to right): Air, Water, Fire, and Earth. Mrs. C. J. (Ella) Martin had spotted the cartoons, that is, designs drawn to scale, at the gallery of Edmund Brooks, a Minneapolis dealer specializing in rare books, and she bought the set expressly to give  ...

It’s hard to know what these schoolchildren—boys standing, girls on the floor—thought of the Charleston Drawing Room and the adjacent dining room, moved to Mia from one of the finest colonial mansions in Charleston, South Carolina. The period rooms opened in 1931 as a memorial from the Bell family. Judging from the setup and the clothing, this photo was  ...

As part of Mia’s Living Rooms initiative, a reanimating of its period rooms, the Queen Anne space has been transformed into a Jane Austen Reading Room. There are chairs, tables, and shelves full of books by Austen and her contemporaries for visitors to sit and read, like Austen famously did in her brother’s Chawton House library.  ...

As part of Mia’s Living Rooms initiative, a reanimating of its period rooms, the Queen Anne space has been transformed into a Jane Austen Reading Room. There are chairs, tables, and shelves full of books by Austen and her contemporaries for visitors to sit and read, like Austen famously did in her brother’s Chawton House library.  ...

In real life, Gina Heath King is like many other Minnesotans, going to Vikings games, talking about the weather, and digging into her graduate studies. But when she enters the fictional world of Jane Austen, she becomes a bit more decorous. She straightens up. Her mind reaches back, and as she tries to explain why Austen’s stories  ...

In real life, Gina Heath King is like many other Minnesotans, going to Vikings games, talking about the weather, and digging into her graduate studies. But when she enters the fictional world of Jane Austen, she becomes a bit more decorous. She straightens up. Her mind reaches back, and as she tries to explain why Austen’s stories  ...

In the Performing Arts Archive on the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota, there are 19 boxes of material relating to Gertrude Lippincott (left): correspondence, newsletters, clippings, photographs, and three audio cassette tapes. More of her papers are kept at the Minnesota Historical Society and the New York Public Library, and every year the  ...

Eugène Delacroix’s 1829 lithograph of a lion munching a rabbit looks like a stuffed animal next to the animated creatures he painted some 30 years later in Lion Hunt (1861), the signature image of “Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh” (on view in Mia’s Target Galleries, now through January  ...

Eleanor Roosevelt was never entirely comfortable being a Roosevelt. The famous family burdened her with one tragedy after another, from an absent, alcoholic father to a mother who belittled her appearance, and both parents died young. She was an orphan when she married Franklin, her cousin, whose extramarital affairs pushed them apart early on. Yet  ...