History of any sort connotes, for me, searching, exploration, and increasingly complex designs. I think of what Henry James spoke of as a “fineness” of insight and perception, of what he described in Portrait of a Lady as expanded consciousness, the pursuit of a larger, “more plentiful” life. Isabel Archer in that novel is a kind of exemplary figure—one who “carried within herself a great fund of life”—whose “deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between her own soul and the agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures—a class of efforts to which she had often committed the conscious solecism of forgiving them much bad painting for the sake of the subject….”