#19th c

Japanese netsuke in hornbill ivory, showing natural preen gland colouring.

The motif of a young man at a window, wooing a woman at her spinning wheel, and the vaguely sixteenth-century German costumes and setting, led writers to associate this painting with the tragic story of Faust and Marguerite. The seduction of the innocent heroine by the wicked Faust was a popular pictorial subject in the nineteenth century, inspired by Goethe’s dramatic poem and its operatic staging by Charles Gounod. Regardless of the lovers’ identities, the lushly painted, romantic scene would have appealed to Bouguereau’s well-heeled clientele.

"The Bower Meadow" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1872)

Mephistopheles, John Petite, 19th Century

utagawa-kuniyoshi  4

The minions of the Red Death help evil spread across Gothic Earth (Ned Dameron, A Guide to Gothic Earth, part of TSR’s 1994 box set Ravenloft: Masque of the Red Death and Other Tales, a campaign not set in the mists of Ravenloft but in an alternate version of our world’s 1890s)

Bowl with Triton, 19th c