Munsey's Magazine, February 1895

Munsey's Magazine, February 1895 (Vol. XII, No. 5), contains several articles on contemporary art. The lead section, "Artists and Their Work," discusses the resurgent market for Old Masters paintings, warning against fraud and forgery by unscrupulous dealers, with some questionable attributions even in the Metropolitan Museum. A feature reports the recovery of four paintings stolen from Frederick L. Ames's Boston home nine years prior—a Millet panel and three other small canvases—after a murderer under arrest disclosed their hiding place in exchange for a fifteen-hundred-dollar reward. The department critiques the National Academy's December exhibition as undistinguished but contextualizes American artistic progress favorably. Profiles include Frederick Bridgman, an Alabama-born orientalist painter active in Paris and Algiers, and Johann Georg Meyer von Bremen, a German painter of child-life subjects represented widely in American collections. The issue also begins serialization of "The Apparition at Islington" by Matthew White Jr., a mystery novel; Chapter XII depicts the trial of Gilbert Dean, accused of murdering his wife after an affair with actress Estelle Osgood.