View allAll Photos Tagged Contented
The first day I brought Zephyr home. He was about 5 months old, fresh from the Washington Border Collie rescue group (although he was mostly McNab Dog, with perhaps border or aussie thrown in.) He loved his Booda bones right from the start!
My cat Faust. He makes a wonderous black and white photo subject. He is a Russian Blue and god of the household. He rules all and thinks he was a human in his past life and his present one too.
-Added to the Cream of the Crop pool as most interesting.
I think Lelu might be Chewing Odin's toy, and Odin might be chewing Lelu's toy, but hey, they're happy.
Contentedly, he takes a nip
And wets his whistle with a sip.
Not bad at all! - he thinks, and then
His beak submerges once again.
He lifts the glass and slurps the rest
Because the last drop tastes the best.
This feeling is amazing,
So light, yet oddly dazing!
In the water by the bridge into Ashford Castle was one very contented (or tired!) swan. Made a nice subject.
Day 110
After a hard day at work I found time for a quick cuddle with my Cat. She's now 17 years old and needs a lot of TLC.
15th October 2010
(EOS 50D-2068-R)
We should all be able to relax so completely. Of course it helps that he is snuggled up on one of his most favorite person's shoulder.
Screen shot from an 8 mm movie. Our still camera broke shortly after arriving on the island and we only had an old-style wind-up 8mm movie camera to document the trip.
Théodore Rousseau - French, 1812 - 1867
Landscape with Boatman, c. 1860
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 92
Théodore Rousseau was born in 1812 in Paris, the son of a tailor from the Jura region. Sent at thirteen to his father's native province, to do office work at a sawmill, he learned to know and love the forests of the Jura. On his return to Paris, having decided to become a landscape painter, he studied briefly with Charles Rémond (1795-1875), a painter of historical landscape, whose instruction he found unhelpful and whom he left, in 1828, for another, no less academic, master, the history painter Guillon-Lethière (1760-1832). He had meanwhile begun to sketch on his own at Saint-Cloud and in the forests of Compiègne and Fontainebleau. In 1829 he vainly tried to enter the academic competition for the Rome Prize for Historical Landscape. The following year, on a tour in the Auvergne, he painted his earliest, distinctly personal landscape studies, on which in 1831 he based his first Salon entry. From a voyage to Normandy in 1832, he returned with studies of sky and sea that he used for The Coast near Granville exhibited in 1833. The following year, a landscape of "Dutch" character, Edge of the Forest at Pierrefonds, was bought by the duc d'Orléans and won him a medal at the Salon. He had meanwhile joined a bohemian clique gathered around Théophile Thoré, an early socialist and future art critic, which included the "prophet" Ganneau, known as the Mapa, who preached ecstatic nature worship. Rousseau's association with these eccentrics and dissenters irritated the Salon authorities, who retaliated by rejecting his submissions. On a tour in the Jura in 1835 he conceived a vast, crowded composition, Descent of the Cattle from the Meadows, that occupied him for a year; it was emphatically rejected by the Salon of 1836. More rebuffs in the following years discouraged him from entering further work. Finding the Salon closed to him, he shifted to saleable subjects of modest scale, treated in a naturalist style. In search of motifs, he visited the forest of Fontainebleau, staying at Chailly in 1834 and, at Barbizon in 1836. In The Forest at Bas-Bréau (Louvre), begun in 1836 and completed in 1867 after many revisions, he presented nature in its irregular forms of growth and decay, without regard to conventions of formal arrangement, while in The Avenue of Chestnuts (Louvre), painted during 1837-1840, he composed a symmetrical view, animated by the writhings of interwoven branches that form a natural architecture. With Jules Dupré (1811-1889), his friend and painting companion in the 1840s, he explored the spacious plains of the Berry and Landes regions, which led him to develop a new compositional scheme, opening large skies and wide horizons behind trees formed of massed dots of color that suggest wind-stirred foliage. During 1845 and 1846 he shared a studio with Dupré in L'Isle-Adam. A contented bachelor until then, he was brought to the brink of matrimony in 1847 by the novelist George Sand who offered him the hand of her adopted daughter. Gossip, which Rousseau blamed on Dupré, frustrated the match. Deeply resentful, he withdrew to the village of Barbizon at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, accompanied by an ailing woman, Eliza Gros, with whom he shared the rest of his life. For purposes of business he kept a Paris address.
The Revolution of 1848, in which he took no active part, temporarily broke the power of academic juries. A committee of artists, including Rousseau, took charge of the liberated Salon, to which he did not himself contribute that year. The government of the new Republic, to make amends for past neglect, asked him for a picture on a subject of his own choice. The result was the large and rather formal View of the Forest of Fontainebleau: Sunset (Louvre). In 1849, at his first Salon in fourteen years, he showed three paintings and was given a gold medal; but Dupré, who had exhibited nothing, received the cross of the Legion of Honor. This ended their friendship. Jean-François Millet, who had moved to Barbizon in 1849, now took Dupré's place in Rousseau's life. Appointed to the Salon jury in 1850, Rousseau exhibited seven paintings that year. The Legion of Honor at last accepted him following the Salon of 1852, at which the duc de Morny, half brother of Napoleon III had bought his Oaks at Apremont (Louvre). Thi following years were an interlude of prosperity in his life. At the Universal Exposition of 1855, which he had helped to jury, his entry of thirteen paintings won a triumphant success. But a reaction soon set in. At the Salons of 1857-1863 his paintings were coldly received. The demand for his work slackened; sales held in 1861 and 1863 produced poor results. Rousseau lived in a state of nervous excitation, haunted by creditors and depressed by his wife's gradual decline into insanity. Mannerisms of color and pattern, at odds with the naturalism expected of him, reawakened the hostility of the critics. In 1866 large purchases by the dealers Brame and Durand-Ruel temporarily restored his finances. Later that year, he was elected president of the art jury for the Universal Exposition of 1867, and at its close received the Grand Medal of Honor. But, unlike other members of the jury, he was not made an officer of the Legion of Honor. The emperor himself ultimately repaired this slight, but the exasperation it had caused Rousseau broke his health. Cared for by Millet, he died in his cottage at Barbizon in December 1867.
Rousseau's naturalism was the product of meditative study, not rapid transcription: incapable of spontaneity, he doggedly reworked his pictures in the studio. He understood nature as a process of constant growth and dissolution and thought of trees as fellow creatures, each marked by its own fate and struggle. Solitary, pious without religion, a materialist romantically in love with nature, he sought in his work to reconcile emotional empathy with objective sight. [This is the artist's biography published in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]
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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...
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