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Jean Siméon Chardin
The House of Cards, probably 1737
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 53
Shown from about the lap up, a young person with brown hair and a peachy complexion faces our left in profile as he leans onto a table and sets folded playing cards up in a row in this vertical painting. Shown against a dark background, his long, brown hair curls by his ears and is pulled back with a navy-blue ribbon at the nape of his neck. He has a delicately sloping nose, his pink lips are closed, the cheek facing us is flushed, and he looks down at the tabletop under lowered lids. He wears a chestnut-brown, long-sleeved coat with a dark blue sash across his chest and tied around his waist. The white of his undershirt peeks out at the high neck and wrists, and the brick-red lining of the sleeve of his jacket rolls back at his right wrist. The wooden table is lined with teal-blue fabric on its surface, and three coins lie near his left hand, closer to us. In that hand he holds three nested, vertically folded playing cards. With his right hand he places the last in a line of ten cards, standing vertically but close together like dominoes, in a curving row in front of him. Scarlet-red diamonds and hearts and the edges of some black shapes are visible within the bent cards. A jack of hearts and a piece of paper or the back of another card sit in a drawer that opens toward us along the side of the table. The artist signed the work in dark brown paint in the lower right corner: “J. Chardin.”
Jean Siméon Chardin (often in his lifetime also called Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin)[1] was born in Paris in 1699 and spent his entire life there. Such a parochial existence was unusual for an artist of Chardin's critical, official, and international reputation. His life was essentially uneventful, if such a statement is appropriate to a man who produced some of the greatest works of art in the eighteenth century. He learned what he needed from the old masters he saw in the French royal collection, in the collections of Parisian amateurs, or passing through the active Parisian art market of the day. He might have claimed he did not need to visit Rome or the Netherlands. Like many artists at the time, Chardin was born into the artisan class (his father manufactured billiard tables), which introduced him into the world of luxury goods, professional decorators, and the fine arts. At about the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to the history painter Pierre Jacques Cazes (1676-1754), soon moving to the studio of Noël Nicolas Coypel (1690-1734). But the elevated path of history painting was not for him. About 1720 he painted a large pictorial signboard (destroyed) for the premises of a surgeon, and his first genre scenes on a modest scale, including The Game of Billiards (Paris, Musée Carnavalet). In 1724 he was received into the Académie de Saint Luc, the painters' guild, and in 1728 he exhibited several works, including The Ray of 1725-1726 and The Buffet of 1728 (both Paris, Musée du Louvre) in the annual Exposition de la jeunesse in the Place Dauphine. These works brought him sufficient attention and acclaim that he was that same year received into the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture as a painter "of animals and fruits": the two celebrated still lifes were his reception pieces. He continued to exhibit at the Exposition de la jeunesse until the Académie established regular exhibitions, exclusive to its own members, in 1737. Until about 1733 Chardin's main production was of still life subjects, but in that year he turned seriously to genre scenes, painting the monumental Woman Sealing a Letter (Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg), dated 1733, and the smaller Woman at a Water Cistern (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum), dated 1733 (or possibly 1735). At the Salon of 1737 Chardin exhibited seven small genre scenes, establishing his mastery in this domain and attracting critical acclaim. A staunch supporter and committee member of the Académie, he exhibited still lifes and genre subjects at every Salon until 1779, the year of his death. From 1755 to 1774 he was treasurer of the academy. From 1761 to 1774 he was tapissier of the Salon, meaning that he supervised the installation of the works in the exhibition. In 1738 an engraving was published after one of the genre scenes--Woman Sealing a Letter--which was to become a regular practice, augmenting Chardin's income through the sale of multiple impressions and disseminating his genre imagery far beyond the Paris Salon and the private walls of his collectors. His art, especially his genre paintings, were sought by bourgeois, aristocratic, and royal collectors across Europe, from Paris to Stockholm, from Edinburgh to St. Petersburg, from Vienna to Karlsruhe. Chardin's laborious method of working, but also the success of certain designs, encouraged him to paint more than one and often several versions of many of his genre and still life subjects. The lowly character of his subject matter and his bold, impastoed manner of painting ran counter to the prevalent rococo trend that dominated the Parisian art world in the early part of his career and to the academic classicism that developed during his last two decades. Yet Chardin remained admired and sought after until the end, in spite of a certain disdain expressed by more academically minded critics. Problems with his eyesight in the last few years led him to adopt pastel painting, in which he made brilliant portraits, especially of his wife and himself.
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
..
________________________________
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
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Girl Arranging Her Hair, 1886
Mary Cassatt
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 86
This young woman sits at her dressing table arranging her hair. She is looking at herself in a mirror just outside the frame. Cassatt is referencing a popular tradition in European painting: male artists depicting women dressing or undressing. These works show erotic fantasies of women in private spaces. By contrast, Cassatt’s sitter is enjoying a peaceful moment of self-regard. Her ruddy complexion, large teeth, and recessed chin do not match beauty ideals of the time.
The carefully drawn pose and richly painted white shirt are set against fantastic pink, red, and mauve wallpaper. They signal the care Cassatt took with this portrait, among the most accomplished in her career.
We look slightly down onto a round faced girl with flushed, pale skin sitting almost in profile on a ladderback chair, facing our right. Shown from the lap up, she almost takes up the height of this vertical painting. She wears a voluminous, ice-blue chemise with elbow-length sleeves and a round, sapphire-blue earring in the ear we can see. Her head is tilted slightly back as she reaches up with both hands. With her right hand, closer to us, she holds the end of a chestnut-brown braid hanging over that shoulder. Her other elbow points upward as she touches hair at the base of the neck. Her lips and face are deeply flushed in her otherwise pale face. Her mouth hangs slightly open, revealing white teeth as her half-closed violet-colored eyes gaze off to our right. She sits in the corner of a room with wallpaper decorated in a pattern of tree limbs and leaves in cranberry red and slate blue on a mauve-pink background. A peanut-brown dresser behind her is covered with a white cloth on which sit a white cup and glass pitcher with a tapered neck. A white porcelain ewer and washbasin, tinged with blue, are partially visible behind her bent left elbow. The lower corner of a mirror in a bamboo frame hangs from the upper right. A portion of a burgundy rug fills the lower left corner.
It was Edgar Degas who invited Cassatt to participate in the impressionist exhibitions, and the two remained close associates. Degas respected Cassatt's work, seeing in her careful compositions an approach to art that was deliberate and well thought out. Degas was known for his sharp criticism of other artists' work. He once complained to Cassatt: "What do women know about style?" She took his words as a challenge to produce a work whose appeal derived, not from a conventionally pretty subject, but purely from artifice, the painter's skill, and style. This painting is the result.
She chose a subject that Degas himself had often depicted: an ordinary, working–class girl at her toilette. The beauty of the picture comes from the rigor of the composition and its harmonized contrast of pinks and blues—in the sitter's nightdress, in the background, and even in her skin. While the moment is casual, even private, the girl's pose and the arrangement of furniture behind her are artfully contrived. Note, for example, how the chair back, the dry sink, and the mirror–frame rise in steps parallel to the motion of her arms, echoing and enhancing their upward sweep.
________________________________
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
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John Neagle - American, 1796 - 1865
Richard Mentor Johnson, 1843
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 60-A
The successful Philadelphia portrait painter John Neagle received one of the most important commissions of his career in 1842, when Whig Party members requested a full-length likeness of their presidential candidate Henry Clay (The Union League of Philadelphia). To execute the portrait, Neagle traveled to Frankfort, Kentucky, where he received additional commissions including this painting of Clay’s fellow Kentuckian Richard Mentor Johnson (1780-1850). Like Clay, Johnson served in both houses of Congress; he also served as the ninth Vice President of the United States in the administration of Martin Van Buren (1837 to 1841).
The son-in-law and student of Philadelphia painter Thomas Sully, Neagle displayed the same bravura brushwork as his mentor. Dazzling strokes define Johnson’s trademark red waistcoat, shiny silk cravat, ruddy complexion, and the breeze-blown gray curls that frame his pensive face. They also enliven the dense, lush trees edged in fall foliage, whose crimson color echoes that of Johnson’s vest. Neagle’s choice of a landscape background, rather than a studio setting, was relatively unusual for portraiture during this era.
John Neagle was born November 4, 1796, while his parents--Irish-born Maurice Nagle and Susannah Taylor, the daughter of a New Jersey farmer--were visiting Boston from their home in Philadelphia. He was baptized as a Roman Catholic, attended grammar school in Philadelphia, and briefly studied art with the drawing master and artist Pietro Ancora. He worked in his step-father Lawrence Ennis's grocery and liquor store until the age of fifteen, when he was apprenticed to a local coach decorator named Thomas Wilson. When Wilson began to take painting lessons from Bass Otis, Neagle was impressed with the likenesses he saw in that artist's studio, and resolved to become a portraitist himself. He studied with Otis for about two months and embarked on a rigorous independent study of art. By 1815 he had begun to paint small oil sketches that he sold for five dollars apiece. It was around this time that the aspiring artist resolved to change the spelling of his name from Nagle to Neagle, after seeing an illustration in Joel Barlow's Columbiad (Philadelphia, 1807) that had been engraved by James Neagle (c. 1769-1822). Neagle was further inspired when Otis introduced him to Thomas Sully, who soon became his mentor.
Tired from the drudgery of decorating coaches and encouraged by the successful results of his early efforts, Neagle left Wilson and set up a modest practice. In 1818 he sought greater professional opportunities in Lexington, Kentucky, but was frustrated by the presence there of Matthew Harris Jouett. He proceeded to New Orleans, where prospects for a portraitist were equally bleak, and immediately returned to Philadelphia, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Neagle began to exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1821, and his earliest portraits of Indians, actors, and clergymen contain the distinguishing characteristic of his mature style: they are forceful, penetrating likenesses that capture the essence of his sitters' personalities. He excelled in portraits of men, but his images of women were often of remarkably inferior quality. Perhaps as a reaction to detail-oriented coach decoration, Neagle was predisposed to learn the painterly British style of Joshua Reynolds, Henry Raeburn, and Thomas Lawrence that he absorbed through Sully's tutelage. In the summer of 1825 he returned to the city of his birth, where he studied with Gilbert Stuart and met Washington Allston. Stuart's influence on Neagle's development was decisive, and reinforced his penchant for the loose, abbreviated British style.
On 29 May 1826 he married Sully's step-daughter Mary Chester Sully, and departed immediately for New York City. There he executed portraits of noted actors and actresses that later appeared as engraved illustrations in a series of books titled The Acting American Theatre. Thereafter followed a period of intense artistic activity during which his artistic style matured rapidly. In 1827 Neagle painted the portrait that earned him a national reputation and for which he is best remembered today, the full-length Pat Lyon at the Forge (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). He painted a second version of it in 1829 (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia). The culminating accomplishment of this period, the Grand Manner portrait Dr. William Potts Dewees (1833, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia), demonstrates how well Neagle mastered the British style without ever having studied in England.
Throughout his long career Neagle painted Philadelphia's prominent doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and clergymen of various denominations. His portraits are often remarkable for the iconographic devices he used to explicate his subjects' professions or important experiences in their lives. Self-educated and conversant on a wide variety of intellectual pursuits, he moved freely in the city's elite social circles. An active and sometimes outspoken exponent of artists' rights who spared no efforts to promote the fine arts in America, Neagle was elected first president of the Artists' Fund Society, a group of dissident artists who had seceded from the Pennsylvania Academy in 1835.
In the early autumn of 1842 a group of Philadelphia's prominent Whig citizens commissioned him to paint the full-length Henry Clay (The Union League of Philadelphia), a portrait that served as a political icon for the Germantown Clay Club during the statesman's bid for the presidency of the United States in 1844. The artist travelled to Clay's farm Ashland in Lexington, Kentucky, and remained in the state painting prominent people until early 1843. The Clay portrait was Neagle's last major work. Depressed by the death of his beloved wife in 1845, he gradually withdrew from society. With very few exceptions, his artistic creativity diminished and his activity as a professional portraitist gradually tapered off. Neagle continued to paint portraits until the late 1850s, when he suffered a severe stroke. He died in Philadelphia in 1865.
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
..
________________________________
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
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Girl Arranging Her Hair, 1886
Mary Cassatt
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 86
This young woman sits at her dressing table arranging her hair. She is looking at herself in a mirror just outside the frame. Cassatt is referencing a popular tradition in European painting: male artists depicting women dressing or undressing. These works show erotic fantasies of women in private spaces. By contrast, Cassatt’s sitter is enjoying a peaceful moment of self-regard. Her ruddy complexion, large teeth, and recessed chin do not match beauty ideals of the time.
The carefully drawn pose and richly painted white shirt are set against fantastic pink, red, and mauve wallpaper. They signal the care Cassatt took with this portrait, among the most accomplished in her career.
We look slightly down onto a round faced girl with flushed, pale skin sitting almost in profile on a ladderback chair, facing our right. Shown from the lap up, she almost takes up the height of this vertical painting. She wears a voluminous, ice-blue chemise with elbow-length sleeves and a round, sapphire-blue earring in the ear we can see. Her head is tilted slightly back as she reaches up with both hands. With her right hand, closer to us, she holds the end of a chestnut-brown braid hanging over that shoulder. Her other elbow points upward as she touches hair at the base of the neck. Her lips and face are deeply flushed in her otherwise pale face. Her mouth hangs slightly open, revealing white teeth as her half-closed violet-colored eyes gaze off to our right. She sits in the corner of a room with wallpaper decorated in a pattern of tree limbs and leaves in cranberry red and slate blue on a mauve-pink background. A peanut-brown dresser behind her is covered with a white cloth on which sit a white cup and glass pitcher with a tapered neck. A white porcelain ewer and washbasin, tinged with blue, are partially visible behind her bent left elbow. The lower corner of a mirror in a bamboo frame hangs from the upper right. A portion of a burgundy rug fills the lower left corner.
It was Edgar Degas who invited Cassatt to participate in the impressionist exhibitions, and the two remained close associates. Degas respected Cassatt's work, seeing in her careful compositions an approach to art that was deliberate and well thought out. Degas was known for his sharp criticism of other artists' work. He once complained to Cassatt: "What do women know about style?" She took his words as a challenge to produce a work whose appeal derived, not from a conventionally pretty subject, but purely from artifice, the painter's skill, and style. This painting is the result.
She chose a subject that Degas himself had often depicted: an ordinary, working–class girl at her toilette. The beauty of the picture comes from the rigor of the composition and its harmonized contrast of pinks and blues—in the sitter's nightdress, in the background, and even in her skin. While the moment is casual, even private, the girl's pose and the arrangement of furniture behind her are artfully contrived. Note, for example, how the chair back, the dry sink, and the mirror–frame rise in steps parallel to the motion of her arms, echoing and enhancing their upward sweep.
________________________________
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
.
Nona With Lighter Complexion Was Found/Bought At Value Village Last Year As For Nona/Tess With The Darker Complexions Were Bought This Year From Kijiji Ottawa.
Girl Arranging Her Hair, 1886
Mary Cassatt
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 86
This young woman sits at her dressing table arranging her hair. She is looking at herself in a mirror just outside the frame. Cassatt is referencing a popular tradition in European painting: male artists depicting women dressing or undressing. These works show erotic fantasies of women in private spaces. By contrast, Cassatt’s sitter is enjoying a peaceful moment of self-regard. Her ruddy complexion, large teeth, and recessed chin do not match beauty ideals of the time.
The carefully drawn pose and richly painted white shirt are set against fantastic pink, red, and mauve wallpaper. They signal the care Cassatt took with this portrait, among the most accomplished in her career.
We look slightly down onto a round faced girl with flushed, pale skin sitting almost in profile on a ladderback chair, facing our right. Shown from the lap up, she almost takes up the height of this vertical painting. She wears a voluminous, ice-blue chemise with elbow-length sleeves and a round, sapphire-blue earring in the ear we can see. Her head is tilted slightly back as she reaches up with both hands. With her right hand, closer to us, she holds the end of a chestnut-brown braid hanging over that shoulder. Her other elbow points upward as she touches hair at the base of the neck. Her lips and face are deeply flushed in her otherwise pale face. Her mouth hangs slightly open, revealing white teeth as her half-closed violet-colored eyes gaze off to our right. She sits in the corner of a room with wallpaper decorated in a pattern of tree limbs and leaves in cranberry red and slate blue on a mauve-pink background. A peanut-brown dresser behind her is covered with a white cloth on which sit a white cup and glass pitcher with a tapered neck. A white porcelain ewer and washbasin, tinged with blue, are partially visible behind her bent left elbow. The lower corner of a mirror in a bamboo frame hangs from the upper right. A portion of a burgundy rug fills the lower left corner.
It was Edgar Degas who invited Cassatt to participate in the impressionist exhibitions, and the two remained close associates. Degas respected Cassatt's work, seeing in her careful compositions an approach to art that was deliberate and well thought out. Degas was known for his sharp criticism of other artists' work. He once complained to Cassatt: "What do women know about style?" She took his words as a challenge to produce a work whose appeal derived, not from a conventionally pretty subject, but purely from artifice, the painter's skill, and style. This painting is the result.
She chose a subject that Degas himself had often depicted: an ordinary, working–class girl at her toilette. The beauty of the picture comes from the rigor of the composition and its harmonized contrast of pinks and blues—in the sitter's nightdress, in the background, and even in her skin. While the moment is casual, even private, the girl's pose and the arrangement of furniture behind her are artfully contrived. Note, for example, how the chair back, the dry sink, and the mirror–frame rise in steps parallel to the motion of her arms, echoing and enhancing their upward sweep.
________________________________
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
.
An unusual spider on my hand.
Light brownish cream in color with darker brown patterns. It's eyes are compactly grouped together.
Name: Araneae > Corinnidae > Echinax sp. ?
Gender / Sex: ♀ Female
Size: 5mm (length)
Location: Agop Batu Tulug Archaeological Museum, Kinabatangan, Sabah.
Date: 6 June 2010
Time: 1:30 pm
A sette anni di distanza ritornano a Trieste i Complexions Contemporary Ballet. Il gruppo di danza internazionale, fondata ventiquattro anni fa da Desmond Richardson e Dwight Rhoden, chiuderà la Stagione Danza del Teatro Stabile del Friuli Venezia Giulia martedì 8 maggio. Primo afroamericano el...
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2018_05_11 Complexions Contemporary Ballet with "From Bach to Bowie" at Teatro Regio di Parma.
© Luca Vantusso for LKV Photo Agency
Kendra Jowers with just basic foundation under the 24th Street Theatre lights on Jan. 19, 2012. Her skin looks amazing under the lights. Photo by: Maria Barquin
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This ghastly display is one of the "Works Of Art" on permanent display at Laumeier Sculpture Park. I hated it at first --and it was a long first; but I eventually started to enjoy the thing. After all, it produced in me strong feelings and that is one of the functions of art, I suppose. I've heard that it is better to feel bad than not feel at all.
So, finally, I deemed this a successful production.
Girl Arranging Her Hair, 1886
Mary Cassatt
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 86
This young woman sits at her dressing table arranging her hair. She is looking at herself in a mirror just outside the frame. Cassatt is referencing a popular tradition in European painting: male artists depicting women dressing or undressing. These works show erotic fantasies of women in private spaces. By contrast, Cassatt’s sitter is enjoying a peaceful moment of self-regard. Her ruddy complexion, large teeth, and recessed chin do not match beauty ideals of the time.
The carefully drawn pose and richly painted white shirt are set against fantastic pink, red, and mauve wallpaper. They signal the care Cassatt took with this portrait, among the most accomplished in her career.
We look slightly down onto a round faced girl with flushed, pale skin sitting almost in profile on a ladderback chair, facing our right. Shown from the lap up, she almost takes up the height of this vertical painting. She wears a voluminous, ice-blue chemise with elbow-length sleeves and a round, sapphire-blue earring in the ear we can see. Her head is tilted slightly back as she reaches up with both hands. With her right hand, closer to us, she holds the end of a chestnut-brown braid hanging over that shoulder. Her other elbow points upward as she touches hair at the base of the neck. Her lips and face are deeply flushed in her otherwise pale face. Her mouth hangs slightly open, revealing white teeth as her half-closed violet-colored eyes gaze off to our right. She sits in the corner of a room with wallpaper decorated in a pattern of tree limbs and leaves in cranberry red and slate blue on a mauve-pink background. A peanut-brown dresser behind her is covered with a white cloth on which sit a white cup and glass pitcher with a tapered neck. A white porcelain ewer and washbasin, tinged with blue, are partially visible behind her bent left elbow. The lower corner of a mirror in a bamboo frame hangs from the upper right. A portion of a burgundy rug fills the lower left corner.
It was Edgar Degas who invited Cassatt to participate in the impressionist exhibitions, and the two remained close associates. Degas respected Cassatt's work, seeing in her careful compositions an approach to art that was deliberate and well thought out. Degas was known for his sharp criticism of other artists' work. He once complained to Cassatt: "What do women know about style?" She took his words as a challenge to produce a work whose appeal derived, not from a conventionally pretty subject, but purely from artifice, the painter's skill, and style. This painting is the result.
She chose a subject that Degas himself had often depicted: an ordinary, working–class girl at her toilette. The beauty of the picture comes from the rigor of the composition and its harmonized contrast of pinks and blues—in the sitter's nightdress, in the background, and even in her skin. While the moment is casual, even private, the girl's pose and the arrangement of furniture behind her are artfully contrived. Note, for example, how the chair back, the dry sink, and the mirror–frame rise in steps parallel to the motion of her arms, echoing and enhancing their upward sweep.
________________________________
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
.
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Alex Katz, (American b. 1927)
Sketch for Passing,
Oil on board painting, 1963.
Depicts a portrait of a man, frontal view to shoulders. He wears a dark suit, white shirt, and a hat. Pale complexion, somewhat abstract features.
_______________________
www.lymanallyn.org/american-perspectives/
The Lyman Allyn Art Museum is home to a collection of more than 18,000 works.
The Museum opened in March 1932 with only 13 objects from the permanent collection on view. Of the original 13 on display, four were of Asian or ancient origin, four were European sculptures – two of which were quite modern – and five were European works on paper dating from the 14th to the 18th centuries. Today, the collection has grown to include more than 18,000 paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, furniture and decorative arts as a result of active acquisitions by the Museum and generous donations to the Lyman Allyn.
The collection spans a 2,600-year period, ranging from ancient Greek and Roman artifacts to works by living artists, with particular strengths in American and European art from the 18th and 19th centuries. Notable artists in the collection include Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, John Copley, Winthrop Chandler, Paul Revere, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Sol LeWitt, Eugene Delacroix, Charles LeBrun, J. A. D. Ingres, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, among many others.
The 18th Century
New London’s deep water harbor has driven the regional economy since colonial times, connecting southeastern Connecticut to the broader Atlantic world. In the 18th century, local shipping merchants specialized in the West Indies trade, exporting livestock and food to Caribbean plantations in exchange for sugar, molasses, and rum. Economic growth and stability in the second half of the century enabled colonists to acquire a greater range of household goods—textiles, silver, glass, ceramics, furniture, and paintings among them. Some goods were imported, while others were produced in the home or by craftsmen and artists, whose work and skill expanded to meet increasing demand. The Tea Table and the painting of Sarah Deshon (from the same family) tell a local story, showing how the Deshons of 18th century New London cemented their status and wealth from trade with objects that conveyed their social and economic standing.
Connecticut played a key role in the American Revolution, as political tension over taxation and colonial governance led to war with Britain. With the British headquartered in New York City, New London’s harbor was an ideal site from which to initiate naval attacks on British loyalists. New London’s privateering (the use of authorized private ships to attack and loot enemy ships) prompted British troops to retaliate, burning New London in the Battle of Groton Heights on September 6, 1781.
Daniel Huntington’s portrait of Abigail Dolbeare Hinman, 1854–56, recreates an episode from this event, showing Hinman standing with her musket in hand, attempting to shoot Benedict Arnold, who can be seen through the window, sitting on horseback.
The 19th Century
As the young nation sought to define itself in the first half of the 19th century, artists created objects and paintings to unite Americans around common ideals of liberty, justice, and hope for the future. Some objects were overtly patriotic, while others were less direct. Hudson River School landscapes, for example, expressed pride in the nation’s natural resources, with scenes from the woods, rivers, and mountains of the northeast standing in for all of America, suggesting the promise of land, the spread of civilization, and the unique, almost spiritual quality of the landscape.
Artists also traveled to Europe to study art and see the sights, painting mountains and classical ruins, as Thomas Cole did in his the majestic view of Mount Etna, drawing visual connections between the ideals of the newly minted American Republic and those of classical antiquity.
Steam power, the railroad, the telegraph, and improved roads and canals ushered in the age of industrialization, facilitating the mass production and transportation of goods. Whereas many objects had been crafted by hand in the previous century, the 19th century saw the rise of goods made with machines. Connecticut mills and factories produced munitions, tinworks, clocks, furniture, and textiles, among other things. Early factories were fueled by whale oil, an important industrial lubricant and lamp fuel supplied by whaling, the most significant part of New London’s economy for several decades.
Isaac Sheffield, who painted portraits of many local whaling captains, portrayed five-year-old James Francis Smith shortly after his return from a long whaling voyage in 1837 with his father, New London whaling captain Franklin Smith. They had gone to Desolation Island in the South Seas, and his portrait shows him wearing a penguin skin coat, with the Chelsea, the ship his father had captained, in the background.
The United States grew dramatically over the course of the 19th century, expanding westward and growing in population with waves of immigration. Regional differences and tension over slavery and states’ rights erupted in the U.S. Civil War (1861–65). In New London County, a number of textile mills were built to supply the Union troops. After the war, New England’s mills became an industrial powerhouse, employing and sustaining entire towns.
The 20th Century
In a period of tremendous growth and change, artists looked forward and back, charting new terrain with abstraction, while revisiting their artistic roots through innovative approaches to traditional genres such as landscape, still life, and portraiture.
The early 20th century was a time of rapid expansion and industrialization fueled in part by waves of immigration. A decade of exuberance followed World War I before the stock market crash of 1929 initiated the Great Depression of the 1930s. Abstraction and European modernism filtered into American art, while a realistic, regional style simultaneously held sway, resulting in a mix of subjects and styles.
Many artists were drawn to the energy and bustle of the modern city, awash in crowds and transformed by industry, skyscrapers and the automobile. The city could be intense, noisy, and oppressive, however, and some artists retreated during the summer to Connecticut art colonies to paint peaceful landscapes and scenes of leisure. Guy Wiggins drew inspiration from both the city and the country, painting impressionistic views of New York in winter, as well as scenes such as Church on the Hill, ca. 1910–12, showing country life in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
Beatrice Cuming’s painting, Chubb, shows a submarine being built in Groton, Connecticut during World War II. Cuming’s canvas affirms New London’s long connection to the sea and celebrates industry at a time when the nation was consumed with the war effort.
Post-War Art
In the prosperity and growth of the post-World War II era, a multiplicity of artistic trends and styles arose, dominated by abstraction. New York emerged as the center of the international art world. The 1960s and ‘70s witnessed cultural upheaval as people of color and women sought equal rights and many protested the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The prevalence of advertising and mass media led artists to explore new themes, performance, and technology, questioning the definitions of art and the idea of originality.
Since the 1980s, the postmodern art world has been in flux, and issues of gender, race, politics, and cultural identity have been at the fore in our globalized and technology-driven world. In A.R.T. (in the new world order), 1994, African-American artist Willie Cole uses text on a blackboard to create an acrostic poem of sorts, using various word associations and erasure to define and comment on art and culture.