Uncovers an artistic puzzle in the illusionist paintings by Edward Collier, a Dutch-British still-life painter who moved to London at the end of the seventeenth century and encoded a sophisticated critique of the information revolution that ushered in the modern information age.[...]

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a radical change occurred in notions of self and personal identity. This was a sudden transformation, says Dror Wahrman, and nothing short of a revolution in the understanding of selfhood and of identity categories including race, gender, and class. In this [...]