How do you lay an Egyptian mummy to rest in a museum? Our curator considered a number of factors in orienting Nesmin, RISD's Egyptian mummy, in his new case in the freshly renovated gallery, but found a strange coincidence in her final decision.

A chance meeting between the wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes and Theodore Davis, an illustrator and journalist for "Harper's Weekly", in the White House conservatory produced one of the most extraordinary dinner services.

Five works on paper in the RISD Museum’s collection follow the arc of Charles Burchfield’s career, introducing and reprising themes that reveal his desire for artistic unity with nature.

Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerlan

Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898.

Curatorial intern Anthony Stott explores the journey of the myths of Ovid—from text to visual medium—in three objects in the neoclassical galleries.

Unfinished paintings by Eastman Johnson, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt reveal new techniques that emerged in France in the second half of the 19th century.

This rare example of Gorham's "Mythologique" flatware service was purposefully left unfinished as they are samples, combining elaborate hand-worked detail with mechanized brute force.

Cleaning an object can be as much about discovery as it is about removing accumulated dust and grime.

There's always more to be discovered: Hidden in plain sight since the 11th century, two inscriptions were found during conservation of the Museum's Dainichi Buddha.

Anya Ventura visits the studio of Rhode Island stone carver Tracy Mahaffey.

Safely stored away during gallery renovations, all 196 pieces of RISD's Gilded Frost and Jet Chandelier by Dale Chihuly have been expertly reinstalled.

While the sixth-floor galleries are undergoing an extensive renovation, the Museum is carefully studying and conducting conservation work on the monumental 12th-century wooden Dainichi Nyorai Buddha. When the Buddha is returned to its gallery in late spring 2014, it will be stabilized and we'll know much more about the art that went into creating this nearly 10-foot-tall sculpture.

The RISD Museum looks back at 100 years of its docent program, and the program's origins and evolution.

Books of hours made during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance were products of collaboration between scribes, illuminators, bookbinders, and, sometimes, the original patron or owner. A recent acquisition of a French book of hours made in Rouen around 1510 tells the story of this collaboration through the structure of its contents, iconography, and assembly.

In 1969, artist Andy Warhol was invited to curate an exhibition at the RISD Museum using works from the permanent collection that were not on view, but in storage.

Ceramics student Lindsay Savoie subverts traditional hierarchies that value painting and sculpture more highly than utilitarian art forms like pottery and photography.

A colossal Romanesque head in the RISD collection has yet to be securely identified, but the sheen of his nose suggests that it was rubbed by many penitent hands during the course of this sculpture’s life.

This late fifteenth-century Virgin and Child was created with subtlety, flexibility, and portability in mind. These features were central to its medieval use—and its use at the RISD Museum.

This article argues that Simon the Pharisee would have been viewed as an explicitly Jewish character by sixteenth-century viewers.

This seven-foot-tall Christ would have been suspended above an altar or screen, the juxtaposition of his damaged body and calm, downward gaze reminding those below him of both his humanity and his divinity. 

Devotional representations of Saint Barbara, a Christian martyr whose legend extended across both Western and Eastern medieval worlds, flourished in fourteenth-century Europe. An examination of the Providence Saint Barbara reveals a sculptural tradition with a complex and colorful practices of medieval devotion to the cult of saints.

In the fall of 2014, RISD art history students curated an exhibition comparing Tokaido Road views by artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858). That exhibition is now on view in the Museum.