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Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) is known, if known at all, as a quiet, conservative painter — a portraitist of the wealthy and well connected in late 19th- and early 20th-century America.

If you think of great libraries as archives of the human condition, maintained to preserve everything we’ve thought and done, then you’d figure Frederick Wiseman would eventually make a film about the New York Public Library.

To the uninitiated it can be hard to understand why anyone would go hiking. Today’s fleece- and Gore-Tex–clad masses may take for granted the attraction of spending weekends doing what...