When Clarence H. White staged and shot "The Ring Toss" in 1899, he was on a mission. Eleven years earlier, George Eastman had introduced his Kodak camera for the masses, and many people were seduced by its slogan, "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest." They avidly captured everyday scenes, sent the camera off to Kodak for processing, and enjoyed the snapshots that came back.

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Norfolk, Va.

Like the U.S. itself, American art is woven from many strands, with the biggest and brightest threads inspired by French, British and Italian traditions. A new exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art gives weight and luster to a different aesthetic influence: "Americans in Spain: Painting and Travel, 1820-1920" explores the many ways American artists like William Merritt Chase, Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent learned from the art, architecture, landscapes and people of Spain.

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In the ocean of federal relief provided to America's unemployed during and after the Great Depression, paying visual artists to create art was perhaps the most innovative wave then and among the most remembered now. With salaries from the Works Progress Administration and related agencies, thousands of men and women made paintings, sculpture, posters, photographs and, most notably, murals that decorated post offices, schools, hospitals, courthouses and other public buildings across the country.

By most counts, New Deal programs produced more than 2,500 murals, though records are incomplete. Worse, in the decades after the programs ended in 1943, many of these murals were moved, painted over, neglected or destroyed.

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Hartford, Conn.

One early piece in the exhibition " Paul Manship : Ancient Made Modern" at the Wadsworth Atheneum is a stunner, but not for the usual reasons. "Centaur and Mermaid" (1909) is a small, dull, lumpy piece of electroplated plaster. It is the polar opposite, artistically, of a pair of works near the end of the show, "Diana" and "Actaeon" (1925). They are dynamic bronze sculptures of the mythical pair with a powerful presence and dazzling patinas.

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There's hardly a more rewarding aspect of travel than strolling a new locale, like a modern-day flâneur. The experience is especially sweet when you see something unexpectedly stunning, as I did some years ago in Riga, Latvia. I knew about its Art Nouveau district, yet when I came upon Albert Street, lined with pastel-hued buildings festooned with faces, figures, peacocks, flowers and other Art Nouveau motifs, I was stopped in my tracks by their beauty.

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