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Nike, Air Force 1 High Lv8 GS Wheat, Size 7Y, Wheat, Gum Light Brown, 807617-701, UPC 00666003268573, 2018, Women’s size 8.5, Big Kids High Top shoe, Suede upper, Gum Out Sole, Perforated detailing on toe box, Perforations for breathability, cored-out gum midsole, dark green Nike branding on the tongue, heel, and outsole, Nike Swoosh on the sides, Ankle strap for security, Polyester tongue, Nike Air branding, Midsole Air-sole for impact absorption, Nike Air branding on the heel, Rubber outsole for increased traction, originally released in 1982, named after the aircraft that carries the President of the United
Nike Air Force 1 High 07 LV8 Flax, Men’s Size 8.5, Wheat, Gum, 806403-200, Outdoor Green, Gum, UPC 00886915173516, ‘Flax’ collection, outdoor green accents, tonal flax Gum outsole, Flax nubuck upper, Gum Out Sole, Perforated detailing on the toe box, Perforations for breathability, Nike Swoosh on the sides, Ankle strap for security, Nubuck tongue with Nike Air branding, Midsole Air-sole for impact absorption, Nike Air branding on the heel, Rubber outsole for increased traction, Bruce Kilgore, basketball sneaker, NBA, AF1, Originally released in 1982, named after the aircraft that carries the President of the United States
Sonata double Class A Desk Dividers installed within YOPA's UK contact centre in Tamworth to reduce noise and reverberation during use
Sonata Aurio Class A acoustic absorption panels installed within the hall at St. Mary's RC Primary School to reduce noise and reverberation during use
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Following successful treatment of the main hall, Sonata Aurio panels were installed within the Cross Church in Hexthorpe
Nike Air Force 1 High, GS, Size 6Y, Deep Royal Blue, Suede Sail 653998-400, UPC 00888409541481, 2015, Women’s size 7.5, Big Kids High Top shoe, Deep Royal Blue Suede upper, sail Out Sole, Perforated detailing on the toe box, Perforations for breathability, Sail midsole, Nike branding on the tongue, heel, and outsole, Nike Swoosh Branding on the sides, Ankle strap for security, Polyester tongue, Nike Air branding, Midsole Air-sole for impact absorption, Nike Air branding on the heel, Rubber outsole for increased traction, originally released in 1982, named after the aircraft that carries the President of the United States,
Sonata double Class A Desk Dividers installed within YOPA's UK contact centre in Tamworth to reduce noise and reverberation during use
Wetlands are biodiversity rich sensitive ecosystems that harbor hundreds of plants, insects, birds and other animals uniquely adapted to their wetland mode of life.They are crucial to maintain the regional water balance through ground water recharge and absorption of flood waters and also serve as the rice bowl of developing countries. Nevertheless, wetlands play immense role in the socio-economic and livelihood aspects of local communities living around the wetland. In India, rural communities depend wetland for livelihood through farming, mat making etc; for food through fishing and hunting; for roof thatching by collection of reeds and palm leaf ; for firewood; for fodder etc. However, these wetlands are now under a threat of conversion for big industrial and real estate projects, change in lifestyle of local community, over extraction of resources by increased population, pollution,waste dumping, eutrophication and pesticide farming. There are three important wetlands in the Puducherry region namely Oussudu, Bahour and Kaliveli that provide important resources for local communities and also are a home to tens of thousands of migratory birds that visit the Puducherry region in winter. These wetlands have been acknowledged as Important Bird Areas(IBAs) by IBCN, since many of these birds are represented in more than 1% of their global population.
The recent threat on wetlands of Puducherry is more due to the change in life style of local community living around these wetlands. The younger generation is not much dependent on wetland resources, The younger and modern generation has lost the compassion and bonding to the wetland which their forefathers maintained through sustainable livelihood practices. This has resulted in a change in attitude and perception of the community towards unsustainable farming and resource extraction, game hunting, intensive fishing and reclamation, ultimately resulting in shrinking of wetland area and loss of biodiversity at an alarming pace. Local community is leaving the traditional farming practices for more fertilizer and pesticide based farming; fish stock is depleted using invasive Gill nets. Since Puducherry is fast developing region with rapidly growing commercial tourism and industrial establishments, these wetlands are under the threat of reclamation for resort construction and other commercial establishments. Poaching for a sport as well as open selling of birds including the threatened species is common. School drop-out are noticed to get attracted to such practices to make easy money as well as hunting for a sport with peers. With time, they may grow into expert hunters who will depend on poaching as the main source of income for the family. There are many wetland awareness programs organized by Forest Department as well as NGOs targeting school kids and educated community through workshops. School drop-outs are often not specially targeted by any of such programs and often not brought under the ambit of such programs. This gap needs to be addressed for local conservation efforts to be fully effective. We have chosen birds as the umbrella species whose conservation will in turn protect the lake and biodiversity as a whole. Birds are attractive and beautiful; ,which may easily get compassion from drop-out kids if guided appropriately. With proper efforts, the poachers can be turned to protectors and expert tour guides to facilitate ecotourism.
Sonata Vario class A acoustic absorption panels installed within Rentalcar's manchester contact centre to reduce reverberation (desk screens supplied by others)
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Sonata Class A rated Acoustic absorption panels are used within a wide variety of buildings to reduce reverberation and give a suitable acoustic environment. SRS are experts in the field of room acoustics and offer a complete service from specification to supply and install. www.soundreduction.co.uk/3se/
Wetlands are biodiversity rich sensitive ecosystems that harbor hundreds of plants, insects, birds and other animals uniquely adapted to their wetland mode of life.They are crucial to maintain the regional water balance through ground water recharge and absorption of flood waters and also serve as the rice bowl of developing countries. Nevertheless, wetlands play immense role in the socio-economic and livelihood aspects of local communities living around the wetland. In India, rural communities depend wetland for livelihood through farming, mat making etc; for food through fishing and hunting; for roof thatching by collection of reeds and palm leaf ; for firewood; for fodder etc. However, these wetlands are now under a threat of conversion for big industrial and real estate projects, change in lifestyle of local community, over extraction of resources by increased population, pollution,waste dumping, eutrophication and pesticide farming. There are three important wetlands in the Puducherry region namely Oussudu, Bahour and Kaliveli that provide important resources for local communities and also are a home to tens of thousands of migratory birds that visit the Puducherry region in winter. These wetlands have been acknowledged as Important Bird Areas(IBAs) by IBCN, since many of these birds are represented in more than 1% of their global population.
The recent threat on wetlands of Puducherry is more due to the change in life style of local community living around these wetlands. The younger generation is not much dependent on wetland resources, The younger and modern generation has lost the compassion and bonding to the wetland which their forefathers maintained through sustainable livelihood practices. This has resulted in a change in attitude and perception of the community towards unsustainable farming and resource extraction, game hunting, intensive fishing and reclamation, ultimately resulting in shrinking of wetland area and loss of biodiversity at an alarming pace. Local community is leaving the traditional farming practices for more fertilizer and pesticide based farming; fish stock is depleted using invasive Gill nets. Since Puducherry is fast developing region with rapidly growing commercial tourism and industrial establishments, these wetlands are under the threat of reclamation for resort construction and other commercial establishments. Poaching for a sport as well as open selling of birds including the threatened species is common. School drop-out are noticed to get attracted to such practices to make easy money as well as hunting for a sport with peers. With time, they may grow into expert hunters who will depend on poaching as the main source of income for the family. There are many wetland awareness programs organized by Forest Department as well as NGOs targeting school kids and educated community through workshops. School drop-outs are often not specially targeted by any of such programs and often not brought under the ambit of such programs. This gap needs to be addressed for local conservation efforts to be fully effective. We have chosen birds as the umbrella species whose conservation will in turn protect the lake and biodiversity as a whole. Birds are attractive and beautiful; ,which may easily get compassion from drop-out kids if guided appropriately. With proper efforts, the poachers can be turned to protectors and expert tour guides to facilitate ecotourism.
Color of Life note
Biofluorescence results from the absorption of electromagnetic radiation at one wavelength by an organism, followed by its reemission at a longer and lower energy wavelength, visually resulting in green, orange, and red emission coloration. Many species of mantis shrimp, for example, make use of fluorescent body parts when in threat display in order to intimidate or confuse either a predator or a competing male.
Ref: Color sources, California Academy of Sciences Docent program May 2015
PLOS one Biofluorescence journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone...
TAXONOMY
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum:Arthropoda
Subphylum: Crustacea
Class: Malacostraca
Order: Stomatopoda
Family: Odontodactylidae
Genus/species: Odontodactylus scyllarus
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS: Beautifully colored in peacock colors of greens, blues, and reds. Has a green body, blue head, green antennal scales, red limbs. The body is elongated with a long, flattened , blue tail and ranges in size from 3–18 cm (1.2-7.0 in). Highly noticeable is the pair of clubbed-shaped, praying mantis-like claws.
DISTRIBUTION/HABITATS: Indo-Pacific Habitat: warm salt water and builds U-shaped burrows in gravel substrates. Depth ranges from 3-40 m (10-131 ft).
DIET IN THE WILD: Feeds on other shrimp, worms, snails, crabs, mollusks. Lies in wait for prey in front of burrow, then swims out and quickly crushes prey with a strong, powerful smash. The claw moves so quickly it generates cavitation bubbles, which explode with a second powerful burst. The speed with which the claw moves through the watergenerates a force 100 times the shrimp’s body weight.
REPRODUCTION: Monogamous. O. scyllarus mate, spawn, brood, and hatch their eggs in their burrows.
LONGEVITY: Often live in pairs for their entire lifetime (4-6 years).
PREDATORS: Yellow Fin tuna
CONSERVATION: IUCN Not Evaluated
REMARKS: Large peacock mantis shrimp generate forces powerful enough to crush the shell of a large conch, and have been known in captivity to break the glass of their tanks! Striking speed of 50+ mph.
The amazingly complex eyes of mantis shrimp detect 12 base colors (compared to our 3). They also can discern ultraviolet, infrared frequencies, and the polarization of light!
Location: Water Planet Sensing AQJ16
References
California Academy of Sciences Steinhart Aquarium Water Planet, Senses Cluster (Sight) 2016
Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org/accounts/Odontodactylus_scyllarus/
Ron's Wordpress shortlink wp.me/p1DZ4b-We
Ron's flickr www.flickr.com/photos/cas_docents/sets/72157608602469734/
9-8-11, 4-22-13, 8-17-15, 2016
Gustave Courbet - French, 1819 - 1877
Calm Sea, 1866
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 92
Gustave Courbet was born in in 1819 in Ornans, a farming town in eastern France, into a closeknit family of the rural middle class. His happy childhood, spent in the woods and fields around Ornans, gave him a taste for the hunt and sport, a dislike for school, and a lifelong love of his native region. While at a boarding school in nearly Besançon, he was briefly taught by a local painter, Charles-Antoine Flajoulot (1774-1840), who called himself a disciple of Jacques-Louis David.
Having gone to Paris in 1839, ostensibly to study law but already determined to become an artist, Courbet entered the studio of Charles Steuben (1788-1856), an academic teacher, from whom, as he later claimed, he learned nothing. Determined to be his own teacher, he launched himself on a course of independent study painting the nude at the teacherless Académie Suisse and copying the Spanish, Venetian, and Dutch masters at the Louvre. The course of his self-education in six years of strenuous work is difficult to chart; much of his early work has been lost. An early attempt at a narrative composition, Lot and His Daughters (private collection, Paris), painted in 1840 and submitted unsuccessfully to the Salon of 1844, seems, in its hearty crudity, like a caricature of Salon painting. But there is energy in its awkwardness, and its nudes give a foretaste of the carnality that was to infuriate his future critics. Famously handsome, Courbet was attractive to women. One of his mistresses bore him a son in 1847. But self-absorption made him unsuited for matrimony, which he regarded, horrified, as slavery.
His imagination needed the stimulus of physical presence and was most deeply stirred by the tangible reality of things and beings. Portraits posed by members of his family gave early proof of his talent, but his favorite subject was himself, and it was in self-portraits that he gave the strongest evidence of a personal style. Theatrical performances as much as likenesses, they show him in dramatic roles-as a man on the verge of madness (The Desperate Man, 1847), as infatuated lover (Lovers in the Countryside, 1844), inspired artist (The Sculptor, 1844), or wounded duelist (The Wounded Man, 1844, Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Romantic in sentiment, these youthful works have painterly qualities that reflect his study of the masters, particularly the baroque painters of dramatic light-and-shadow modeling, Caravaggio, Ribera, and Rembrandt. The 1840s were a time of struggle during which Salon juries often refused his submissions. Self-portrait with Black Spaniel (1844, PetitPal), a work of very confident execution and the first of his paintings to be accepted for the Salon, continued the long series of his self-portraits, followed by Self-Portrait with Leather Belt (c. 1846, Louvre), Self-Portrait as Cellist (c. 1847, National Museum, Stockholm), and the masterly Self-Portrait with Pipe (c. 1849, Musée Fabre, Montpellier). The Guitar Player (c. 1844, private collection, Bedford, New York), a romantic costume piece, was admitted to the Salon of 1845 that rejected The Hammock (1844-1845, Oskar Reinhart Stiftung, Winterthur), an early instance of what was to be a recurrent motif ín Courbet's work: a sexually attractive woman observed while asleep. As an outsider by choice, he cheerfully defied the official establishment, certain of winning his public by the sheer strength of native genius: a "student of nature" who owed no debt to any teacher. But the "nature" that nourished his art was an irresistible appetite for painting which initially led him to the museum, where, aided by prodigious technical facility, he plundered the masters of whatever appealed to his instinct--his nature.
The Revolution of 1848 brought his work to a wider audience. Compulsively gregarious, he shone nightly in high-spirited gatherings at Andler's beer hall, where his companions included the painter François Bonvin (1877-1887), the musician Alphonse Promayet, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and the critic Jules Champfleury. To the Salon of 1849, which, unlike the revolutionary Salon of 1848, was no longer non-juried, he submitted eleven paintings. Among those accepted was After Dinner at Ornans (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille), an intimately domestic scene boldly treated in dimensions normally reserved for historical subjects. Its grave realism, reminiscent of Louis Le Nain's (1593-1648) Peasant Repast (1642, Louvre), was admired by artists (Eugène Delacroix) and critics (Champfleury) and earned him a gold medal, which rendered him hors concours for life at the Salons.
In the autumn of 1849 he returned to Ornans, where his father had prepared a studio for him. With the coming Salon in view, he rapidly completed a group of nine paintings, including several of monumental dimensions. The funeral of his maternal grandfather, Antoine Oudot, gave him the idea for the enormous Funeral at Ornans (Louvre), posed by members of his family and citizens of Ornans gathered around the priest officiating at the open grave. A second entry, the life-size Stonebreakers (formerly Dresden Museum, destroyed in 1945), recalled an encounter with road menders in the vicinity of Ornans. Exhibited at the time when a reaction against the recent revolution was gathering force, these unadorned scenes from common life were vehemently denounced for their supposedly socialist tendency and for what critics regarded as their offensive ugliness.
The coup d'état of December 1851, which made Louis-Napoleon the dictator of France and led to his "election" as emperor in 1852, drastically changed the climate in the world of art. The government of Napoleon III, though liberal to a degree, did not tolerate genuine dissent. Appeased by lavish patronage, many artists submitted. Courbet gave himself truculent oppositional airs, but thereafter avoided subjects that could be seen as hostile to the regime. Shortly before Napoleon's seizure of power, Courbet undertook a composition meant to disarm his critics, Young Ladies of the Village Giving Alms to a Cow Girl (1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art), which was bought, even before its exhibition at the Salon of 1852, by one of the most powerful men of the new regime, Napoleon's half brother, comte de Morny. For the Salon of 1853, Courbet once again made an effort at a spectacular presentation. The political situation urged caution in the choice of subjects, for which he sought to compensate by a show of artistic daring. The Bathers (1853, Musée Fabre, Montpellier), his first exhibited nude of large dimensions, caused a lively scandal by the exuberant fleshiness of the main bather's back and posterior. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Courbet's socialist friend, read an indictment of bourgeois society into these fesses colossales, while Delacroix, who admired the nude's vigorous execution, deplored the ponderous insignificance of its gesture. Courbet's best-liked picture at the Salon, The Sleeping Spinner (1853, Musée Fabre, Montpellier), the portrait of a buxom girl in a drowse beside her spinning wheel, was bought by Alfred Bruyas, an art patron of Montpellier, who also acquired the controversial Bathers, beginning a long association with the artist who was soon to be in need of a financial backer. His Portrait of Bruyas (1853, Musée Fabre, Montpellier), which shows the sitter holding a volume entitled La Solution, hints at the role Courbet had in mind for his patron. Insisting on total artistic freedom, and aware that, as a result, he could not rely on state subsidies, he envisioned support freely given by private patrons as a desirable alternative. The mutual accommodation of independent artist and private patron was the "solution" that he proposed and that Bruyas cautiously accepted as the basis of a free art-economy of the future. The need for such an arrangement was impressed on Courbet by his dealings with the government's director of the Beaux-Arts, comte Nieuwerkerke, who had invited him to paint a large picture "in his most vigorous style" for the Universal Exposition of 1855. There were only two conditions: the submission of a preliminary sketch and approval of the finished painting by a jury of his own choice. This moved Courbet to declare that he would not have his work judged by any jury: rather than making the slightest sacrifice of his freedom, he would withdraw from the official exhibition and show his works in a rival exhibition of his own.
On a visit to Bruyas, in May 1854, he sought to persuade his patron to underwrite the cost of a one-man show. The main result of the voyage was a large picture, The Meeting (1854, Musée Fabre, Montpellier), which shows the artist, proudly erect, encountering his respectful patron--"Fortune bowing to Genius," according to a contemporary reviewer. Bruyas proved to be unable to finance a private venue, and Courbet resigned himself to submitting his paintings to the official exhibition. Their centerpiece was to be an immense personal statement, The Studio: A Realist Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artist's Life (Louvre), showing him at work, surrounded by "all the people who serve my cause, sustain me in my idea, and support my action." Besides its personal self-celebration, the painting had the more general purpose of presenting the Artist as the exemplar of human creativity. When Courbet learned in the spring of 1855 that the jurors had rejected two of his fourteen entries, The Studio and Funeral at Ornans, he renewed his plan for an exhibition of his own and within a short time managed to have a temporary gallery built near the official exhibition, placing over its entrance the sign Le Réalisme. He did not, however, boycott the official exhibition but contributed eleven of his most important works to it. His own show, opened a month later, included thirty-nine paintings and four drawings. To Courbet's surprise, attendance was sparse.
Disappointed and in poor health, he emerged from this phase of his career with a lessened zest for controversy. From 1855 onward he largely abandoned social subjects and avoided, except in a few instances, complex compositions, instead devoting himself mainly to landscapes, scenes of the hunt, nudes, and portraits. At the Salon of 1857, he showed Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (PetitPal), an opulent human still life posed by two fashionably dressed women, drowsing in the summer heat at the river's edge. This Salon also contained two of the hunting pictures that were becoming one of his specialities, Exhausted Doe in the Snow (private collection, New York) and The Quarry (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), in the latter of which he appears standing beside the carcass of a slain buck. Successful exhibitions in 1858 and 1859 took him to Brussels and to Frankfurt, where he made a lengthy stay and received commissions for portraits and hunting subjects. Back in Paris, his dramatic forest scenes (Battle of Stags, 1861, Louvre) won him a popular success. From the mid-1850s onward landscapes played an increasing part in his work. He found his motifs in his native Franche-Comté whose hillsides, forests, and streams had deeply impressed him in his youth. In his dark-toned landscapes he concentrated on the tangible matter of stone, turf, and foliage rather than on fugitive effects of light and atmosphere. Setting up his easel wherever the view pleased him, he painted directly in oils, making use of rich paints that he spread on the canvas with the palette knife. About 1863-1865 he painted the series Source of the Loue. Close views of a rock face opening into a cavern from whose depths the river flows, they invert norms of landscape painting by replacing sky and space with solid matter.
Nudes dominate his late figure painting. The Awakening (Venus Pursuing Psyche with Her Jealousy), destroyed in World War II, was refused by the Salon of 1864 because of its hint at lesbianism. Courbet profited from this rejection by converting the naked Psyche into Woman with Parrot (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a suave nude that was admired at the Salon of 1866. The Awakening's true sequel was his frankly lesbian Sleep (Les Dormeuses) (1866, PetitPal), painted for a collector of erotica. A still life of passive bodies, it expresses Courbet's materialist aesthetic and his pleasure at the sight of women reduced by sleep to purely physical existence. At the Universal Exposition of 1867, he again had a pavilion, built at his own expense at the Pont d'Alma, in which he presented more than a hundred paintings in a retrospective that won favorable reviews. Lionized by society in the empire's final years, he loudly refused the Legion of Honor offered him in 1870. After a summer at the seaside village of Etretat, he prepared a selection of seascapes for the Salon of 1870, among them The Wave (Louvre). Having heretofore shown nature mainly in a state of rest, he now produced, in paintings of the agitated sea, images of the elements in powerful motion.
The collapse of the empire after its defeat by Prussia in 1870 rekindled Courbet's political activism. As member of the Arts Commission of the Paris Commune, then defending the city against the forces of the national government quartered in Versailles, he recommended the destruction of the Vendôme Column, a symbol of Bonapartism. When the Commune fell, he suffered arrest, a trial, and six months in prison. Only fifty-one years old, he was in poor health, his body bloated from overindulgence in food and drink. Freed in early 1872, he returned to Ornans, where he found his studio looted. His submissions to the Salon were refused, but his work continued to have steady and profitable sales. In the spring of 1873 he was condemned to bear the cost of the reerection of the Vendôme Column. Fearing renewed imprisonment, he fled to Switzerland, where he settled in the town of La Tour de Peilz on the Lake of Geneva. In Paris, meanwhile, his property was confiscated and a fine of 323,000 francs imposed on him.
In his last years, he worked feverishly to produce paintings for sale to meet the State's exorbitant demand. Helped by assistants, he began a mass production, chiefly of landscapes, hasty parodies of his style, and in their repetitiousness a mockery of realism. But his talent was not extinguished yet. Flashes of it still appeared in personal work, in portraits, animal studies, and still lifes. The Trout (1872, Kunsthaus, Zurich), the picture of a superb, glistening fish suspended by its gills and expiring, is a poignant image of captivity and death, and perhaps a final self-portrait.
Cared for by friends, still hoping to return to France, he gradually succumbed to heart and liver disease. After undergoing painful medical treatment, he died on 31 December 1877.
[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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Fluorescing Coral- Fluorescence is the absorption of one wavelength of light and the re-emission of another, a totally different colour. A fluorescent object under near UV light, it absorbs the blue and re-emits a fluorescent colour, brightly glowing in a totally different colour. - Raja Ampat, Dampier Strait, West Papua, Indonesia.
Timberland 6” Premium Waterproof Boots, 6 Inch, Men’s Size 10, Tan, Natural Horween, A1JJB, TB0A1JJB, UPC 190852615801, EAN 0190852615801, Premium waterproof Horween Latigo leather uppers, Seam-sealed waterproof construction, Direct-attach construction for durability, Leather lining for comfort and durability, Rustproof hardware, anti-fatigue technology, 200 grams of PrimaLoft® insulation, Padded collar for a comfortable fit around the ankle, Anti-fatigue midsole and removable footbed for all-day comfort, lightweight cushioning and shock absorption, Rubber lug outsole is made with 10% plant-based materials,
Nike, Air Force 1 High Lv8 GS Wheat, Size 7Y, Wheat, Gum Light Brown, 807617-701, UPC 00666003268573, 2018, Women’s size 8.5, Big Kids High Top shoe, Suede upper, Gum Out Sole, Perforated detailing on toe box, Perforations for breathability, cored-out gum midsole, dark green Nike branding on the tongue, heel, and outsole, Nike Swoosh on the sides, Ankle strap for security, Polyester tongue, Nike Air branding, Midsole Air-sole for impact absorption, Nike Air branding on the heel, Rubber outsole for increased traction, originally released in 1982, named after the aircraft that carries the President of the United
We live in the age of I, Me, Mine. Everyone is trying to find themselves, explore themselves, understand themselves, actualize themselves, and fulfill themselves. But where does healthy self-development end and unhealthy self-preoccupation begin?
Timberland 6” Premium Waterproof Boots, 6 Inch, Men’s Size 10, Tan, Natural Horween, A1JJB, TB0A1JJB, UPC 190852615801, EAN 0190852615801, Premium waterproof Horween Latigo leather uppers, Seam-sealed waterproof construction, Direct-attach construction for durability, Leather lining for comfort and durability, Rustproof hardware, anti-fatigue technology, 200 grams of PrimaLoft® insulation, Padded collar for a comfortable fit around the ankle, Anti-fatigue midsole and removable footbed for all-day comfort, lightweight cushioning and shock absorption, Rubber lug outsole is made with 10% plant-based materials,
Wetlands are biodiversity rich sensitive ecosystems that harbor hundreds of plants, insects, birds and other animals uniquely adapted to their wetland mode of life.They are crucial to maintain the regional water balance through ground water recharge and absorption of flood waters and also serve as the rice bowl of developing countries. Nevertheless, wetlands play immense role in the socio-economic and livelihood aspects of local communities living around the wetland. In India, rural communities depend wetland for livelihood through farming, mat making etc; for food through fishing and hunting; for roof thatching by collection of reeds and palm leaf ; for firewood; for fodder etc. However, these wetlands are now under a threat of conversion for big industrial and real estate projects, change in lifestyle of local community, over extraction of resources by increased population, pollution,waste dumping, eutrophication and pesticide farming. There are three important wetlands in the Puducherry region namely Oussudu, Bahour and Kaliveli that provide important resources for local communities and also are a home to tens of thousands of migratory birds that visit the Puducherry region in winter. These wetlands have been acknowledged as Important Bird Areas(IBAs) by IBCN, since many of these birds are represented in more than 1% of their global population.
The recent threat on wetlands of Puducherry is more due to the change in life style of local community living around these wetlands. The younger generation is not much dependent on wetland resources, The younger and modern generation has lost the compassion and bonding to the wetland which their forefathers maintained through sustainable livelihood practices. This has resulted in a change in attitude and perception of the community towards unsustainable farming and resource extraction, game hunting, intensive fishing and reclamation, ultimately resulting in shrinking of wetland area and loss of biodiversity at an alarming pace. Local community is leaving the traditional farming practices for more fertilizer and pesticide based farming; fish stock is depleted using invasive Gill nets. Since Puducherry is fast developing region with rapidly growing commercial tourism and industrial establishments, these wetlands are under the threat of reclamation for resort construction and other commercial establishments. Poaching for a sport as well as open selling of birds including the threatened species is common. School drop-out are noticed to get attracted to such practices to make easy money as well as hunting for a sport with peers. With time, they may grow into expert hunters who will depend on poaching as the main source of income for the family. There are many wetland awareness programs organized by Forest Department as well as NGOs targeting school kids and educated community through workshops. School drop-outs are often not specially targeted by any of such programs and often not brought under the ambit of such programs. This gap needs to be addressed for local conservation efforts to be fully effective. We have chosen birds as the umbrella species whose conservation will in turn protect the lake and biodiversity as a whole. Birds are attractive and beautiful; ,which may easily get compassion from drop-out kids if guided appropriately. With proper efforts, the poachers can be turned to protectors and expert tour guides to facilitate ecotourism.
The lactic acid bacteria created by natural fermentation processes has a great impact on iron absorption. The African fermented dairy beverage amasi is a great example of lactic acid formation in ferments. In the graph are some of the results from a study of the ability of lactic acid bacteria over-powering the (sometimes) deadly e. coli bacteria. In fruits and vegetables, the lactic acid bacteria also works to free up more iron so that you can digest it more readily.
The amasi in this example is a dairy product which may impede iron absorption to some degree, but it is critical for calcium nonetheless. Drink your amasi or other fermented dairy beverage separate from your iron rich meal. Fermented dairy beverages such as kefir and yogurt drinks are commonly available, but for amasi, your best best is checking out the company in this review: Beyond Organic. Beyond Organic provides fruity amasi concoctions to consumers.
Nike Air Force 1 High 07 LV8 Flax, Men’s Size 8.5, Wheat, Gum, 806403-200, Outdoor Green, Gum, UPC 00886915173516, ‘Flax’ collection, outdoor green accents, tonal flax Gum outsole, Flax nubuck upper, Gum Out Sole, Perforated detailing on the toe box, Perforations for breathability, Nike Swoosh on the sides, Ankle strap for security, Nubuck tongue with Nike Air branding, Midsole Air-sole for impact absorption, Nike Air branding on the heel, Rubber outsole for increased traction, Bruce Kilgore, basketball sneaker, NBA, AF1, Originally released in 1982, named after the aircraft that carries the President of the United States
A Fomapan Action 400 black-and-white film to test the effect a the special Foca filter "Dyma" produced in France in the 50's.
The filter is called "Dyma" due to the presence of neodymium in the glass giving an unusual absorption by bands in the visible spectrum. In particulier blue and yellow color ans more absorbed than the rest of the spectrum. The filter existed in two different versions with the coefficient x2.5 or 3.5. Here the 42mm push-on Foca Dyma filter used is a x 3.5.
As a consequence, I exposed the Foma 400 for 80 ISO using a Minolta Autometer III with a 10° finder for selective measurements privileging the shadow areas. I used my FOCA camera PF2B year 1956 and its normal Oplar lens1:2.8 f=5cm equipped for all the views with the Dyma filter and a Genaco metal shade hood.
Typical settings during the session : 1/100s f/8 to f/11.
Rue Jeanne-Marie Célu, May 29, 2023
69001 Lyon
France
After exposure, the film was processed using Adox Adonal (Agfa Rodinal) developer at dilution 1+25, 20°C for 6 min.
The film was then digitalized using a Sony A7 body adapted to a Minolta Auto Bellows III and a Minolta Slide Duplicator using a lens Minolta Bellow Macro Rokkor 50mm f/3.5 at a reproduction ratio of 1:1. The reproduced RAW files obtained were processed in LR prior the the final JPEG editions.
All views of the film are presented in the dedicated album either in the printed framed versions and unframed full-size jpeg.
About the camera and the lens:
The Foca type PF2B (PF for "Petit Format") was constructed in France by the company "Optique & Precision de Levallois" (OPL) starting from 1947. It was manufactured in the Chateaudun OPL factory, route de Jallans, France, in 1956 among a late series of the PF2B. The factory, constructed in 1938, is still at the same place under the name of SAFRAN now producing precision devices for aerospace appliances.
The camera is equipped with the collapsible OPLAR lens (a Tessar formula) 1:2.8 f=5cm. The focal shutter of the PF2B has timing of 1/1000, 1/500, 1/200, 1/100, 1/50 and 1/25s plus the B pose. A slow exposure device below 1/25s could be installed by the aftermarket service and was installed basically for the FOCA PF3 and Foca Universel.
Gustave Courbet - French, 1819 - 1877
A Young Woman Reading, c. 1866/1868
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 90
Gustave Courbet was born in in 1819 in Ornans, a farming town in eastern France, into a closeknit family of the rural middle class. His happy childhood, spent in the woods and fields around Ornans, gave him a taste for the hunt and sport, a dislike for school, and a lifelong love of his native region. While at a boarding school in nearly Besançon, he was briefly taught by a local painter, Charles-Antoine Flajoulot (1774-1840), who called himself a disciple of Jacques-Louis David.
Having gone to Paris in 1839, ostensibly to study law but already determined to become an artist, Courbet entered the studio of Charles Steuben (1788-1856), an academic teacher, from whom, as he later claimed, he learned nothing. Determined to be his own teacher, he launched himself on a course of independent study painting the nude at the teacherless Académie Suisse and copying the Spanish, Venetian, and Dutch masters at the Louvre. The course of his self-education in six years of strenuous work is difficult to chart; much of his early work has been lost. An early attempt at a narrative composition, Lot and His Daughters (private collection, Paris), painted in 1840 and submitted unsuccessfully to the Salon of 1844, seems, in its hearty crudity, like a caricature of Salon painting. But there is energy in its awkwardness, and its nudes give a foretaste of the carnality that was to infuriate his future critics. Famously handsome, Courbet was attractive to women. One of his mistresses bore him a son in 1847. But self-absorption made him unsuited for matrimony, which he regarded, horrified, as slavery.
His imagination needed the stimulus of physical presence and was most deeply stirred by the tangible reality of things and beings. Portraits posed by members of his family gave early proof of his talent, but his favorite subject was himself, and it was in self-portraits that he gave the strongest evidence of a personal style. Theatrical performances as much as likenesses, they show him in dramatic roles-as a man on the verge of madness (The Desperate Man, 1847), as infatuated lover (Lovers in the Countryside, 1844), inspired artist (The Sculptor, 1844), or wounded duelist (The Wounded Man, 1844, Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Romantic in sentiment, these youthful works have painterly qualities that reflect his study of the masters, particularly the baroque painters of dramatic light-and-shadow modeling, Caravaggio, Ribera, and Rembrandt. The 1840s were a time of struggle during which Salon juries often refused his submissions. Self-portrait with Black Spaniel (1844, PetitPal), a work of very confident execution and the first of his paintings to be accepted for the Salon, continued the long series of his self-portraits, followed by Self-Portrait with Leather Belt (c. 1846, Louvre), Self-Portrait as Cellist (c. 1847, National Museum, Stockholm), and the masterly Self-Portrait with Pipe (c. 1849, Musée Fabre, Montpellier). The Guitar Player (c. 1844, private collection, Bedford, New York), a romantic costume piece, was admitted to the Salon of 1845 that rejected The Hammock (1844-1845, Oskar Reinhart Stiftung, Winterthur), an early instance of what was to be a recurrent motif ín Courbet's work: a sexually attractive woman observed while asleep. As an outsider by choice, he cheerfully defied the official establishment, certain of winning his public by the sheer strength of native genius: a "student of nature" who owed no debt to any teacher. But the "nature" that nourished his art was an irresistible appetite for painting which initially led him to the museum, where, aided by prodigious technical facility, he plundered the masters of whatever appealed to his instinct--his nature.
The Revolution of 1848 brought his work to a wider audience. Compulsively gregarious, he shone nightly in high-spirited gatherings at Andler's beer hall, where his companions included the painter François Bonvin (1877-1887), the musician Alphonse Promayet, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and the critic Jules Champfleury. To the Salon of 1849, which, unlike the revolutionary Salon of 1848, was no longer non-juried, he submitted eleven paintings. Among those accepted was After Dinner at Ornans (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille), an intimately domestic scene boldly treated in dimensions normally reserved for historical subjects. Its grave realism, reminiscent of Louis Le Nain's (1593-1648) Peasant Repast (1642, Louvre), was admired by artists (Eugène Delacroix) and critics (Champfleury) and earned him a gold medal, which rendered him hors concours for life at the Salons.
In the autumn of 1849 he returned to Ornans, where his father had prepared a studio for him. With the coming Salon in view, he rapidly completed a group of nine paintings, including several of monumental dimensions. The funeral of his maternal grandfather, Antoine Oudot, gave him the idea for the enormous Funeral at Ornans (Louvre), posed by members of his family and citizens of Ornans gathered around the priest officiating at the open grave. A second entry, the life-size Stonebreakers (formerly Dresden Museum, destroyed in 1945), recalled an encounter with road menders in the vicinity of Ornans. Exhibited at the time when a reaction against the recent revolution was gathering force, these unadorned scenes from common life were vehemently denounced for their supposedly socialist tendency and for what critics regarded as their offensive ugliness.
The coup d'état of December 1851, which made Louis-Napoleon the dictator of France and led to his "election" as emperor in 1852, drastically changed the climate in the world of art. The government of Napoleon III, though liberal to a degree, did not tolerate genuine dissent. Appeased by lavish patronage, many artists submitted. Courbet gave himself truculent oppositional airs, but thereafter avoided subjects that could be seen as hostile to the regime. Shortly before Napoleon's seizure of power, Courbet undertook a composition meant to disarm his critics, Young Ladies of the Village Giving Alms to a Cow Girl (1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art), which was bought, even before its exhibition at the Salon of 1852, by one of the most powerful men of the new regime, Napoleon's half brother, comte de Morny. For the Salon of 1853, Courbet once again made an effort at a spectacular presentation. The political situation urged caution in the choice of subjects, for which he sought to compensate by a show of artistic daring. The Bathers (1853, Musée Fabre, Montpellier), his first exhibited nude of large dimensions, caused a lively scandal by the exuberant fleshiness of the main bather's back and posterior. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Courbet's socialist friend, read an indictment of bourgeois society into these fesses colossales, while Delacroix, who admired the nude's vigorous execution, deplored the ponderous insignificance of its gesture. Courbet's best-liked picture at the Salon, The Sleeping Spinner (1853, Musée Fabre, Montpellier), the portrait of a buxom girl in a drowse beside her spinning wheel, was bought by Alfred Bruyas, an art patron of Montpellier, who also acquired the controversial Bathers, beginning a long association with the artist who was soon to be in need of a financial backer. His Portrait of Bruyas (1853, Musée Fabre, Montpellier), which shows the sitter holding a volume entitled La Solution, hints at the role Courbet had in mind for his patron. Insisting on total artistic freedom, and aware that, as a result, he could not rely on state subsidies, he envisioned support freely given by private patrons as a desirable alternative. The mutual accommodation of independent artist and private patron was the "solution" that he proposed and that Bruyas cautiously accepted as the basis of a free art-economy of the future. The need for such an arrangement was impressed on Courbet by his dealings with the government's director of the Beaux-Arts, comte Nieuwerkerke, who had invited him to paint a large picture "in his most vigorous style" for the Universal Exposition of 1855. There were only two conditions: the submission of a preliminary sketch and approval of the finished painting by a jury of his own choice. This moved Courbet to declare that he would not have his work judged by any jury: rather than making the slightest sacrifice of his freedom, he would withdraw from the official exhibition and show his works in a rival exhibition of his own.
On a visit to Bruyas, in May 1854, he sought to persuade his patron to underwrite the cost of a one-man show. The main result of the voyage was a large picture, The Meeting (1854, Musée Fabre, Montpellier), which shows the artist, proudly erect, encountering his respectful patron--"Fortune bowing to Genius," according to a contemporary reviewer. Bruyas proved to be unable to finance a private venue, and Courbet resigned himself to submitting his paintings to the official exhibition. Their centerpiece was to be an immense personal statement, The Studio: A Realist Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artist's Life (Louvre), showing him at work, surrounded by "all the people who serve my cause, sustain me in my idea, and support my action." Besides its personal self-celebration, the painting had the more general purpose of presenting the Artist as the exemplar of human creativity. When Courbet learned in the spring of 1855 that the jurors had rejected two of his fourteen entries, The Studio and Funeral at Ornans, he renewed his plan for an exhibition of his own and within a short time managed to have a temporary gallery built near the official exhibition, placing over its entrance the sign Le Réalisme. He did not, however, boycott the official exhibition but contributed eleven of his most important works to it. His own show, opened a month later, included thirty-nine paintings and four drawings. To Courbet's surprise, attendance was sparse.
Disappointed and in poor health, he emerged from this phase of his career with a lessened zest for controversy. From 1855 onward he largely abandoned social subjects and avoided, except in a few instances, complex compositions, instead devoting himself mainly to landscapes, scenes of the hunt, nudes, and portraits. At the Salon of 1857, he showed Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (PetitPal), an opulent human still life posed by two fashionably dressed women, drowsing in the summer heat at the river's edge. This Salon also contained two of the hunting pictures that were becoming one of his specialities, Exhausted Doe in the Snow (private collection, New York) and The Quarry (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), in the latter of which he appears standing beside the carcass of a slain buck. Successful exhibitions in 1858 and 1859 took him to Brussels and to Frankfurt, where he made a lengthy stay and received commissions for portraits and hunting subjects. Back in Paris, his dramatic forest scenes (Battle of Stags, 1861, Louvre) won him a popular success. From the mid-1850s onward landscapes played an increasing part in his work. He found his motifs in his native Franche-Comté whose hillsides, forests, and streams had deeply impressed him in his youth. In his dark-toned landscapes he concentrated on the tangible matter of stone, turf, and foliage rather than on fugitive effects of light and atmosphere. Setting up his easel wherever the view pleased him, he painted directly in oils, making use of rich paints that he spread on the canvas with the palette knife. About 1863-1865 he painted the series Source of the Loue. Close views of a rock face opening into a cavern from whose depths the river flows, they invert norms of landscape painting by replacing sky and space with solid matter.
Nudes dominate his late figure painting. The Awakening (Venus Pursuing Psyche with Her Jealousy), destroyed in World War II, was refused by the Salon of 1864 because of its hint at lesbianism. Courbet profited from this rejection by converting the naked Psyche into Woman with Parrot (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a suave nude that was admired at the Salon of 1866. The Awakening's true sequel was his frankly lesbian Sleep (Les Dormeuses) (1866, PetitPal), painted for a collector of erotica. A still life of passive bodies, it expresses Courbet's materialist aesthetic and his pleasure at the sight of women reduced by sleep to purely physical existence. At the Universal Exposition of 1867, he again had a pavilion, built at his own expense at the Pont d'Alma, in which he presented more than a hundred paintings in a retrospective that won favorable reviews. Lionized by society in the empire's final years, he loudly refused the Legion of Honor offered him in 1870. After a summer at the seaside village of Etretat, he prepared a selection of seascapes for the Salon of 1870, among them The Wave (Louvre). Having heretofore shown nature mainly in a state of rest, he now produced, in paintings of the agitated sea, images of the elements in powerful motion.
The collapse of the empire after its defeat by Prussia in 1870 rekindled Courbet's political activism. As member of the Arts Commission of the Paris Commune, then defending the city against the forces of the national government quartered in Versailles, he recommended the destruction of the Vendôme Column, a symbol of Bonapartism. When the Commune fell, he suffered arrest, a trial, and six months in prison. Only fifty-one years old, he was in poor health, his body bloated from overindulgence in food and drink. Freed in early 1872, he returned to Ornans, where he found his studio looted. His submissions to the Salon were refused, but his work continued to have steady and profitable sales. In the spring of 1873 he was condemned to bear the cost of the reerection of the Vendôme Column. Fearing renewed imprisonment, he fled to Switzerland, where he settled in the town of La Tour de Peilz on the Lake of Geneva. In Paris, meanwhile, his property was confiscated and a fine of 323,000 francs imposed on him.
In his last years, he worked feverishly to produce paintings for sale to meet the State's exorbitant demand. Helped by assistants, he began a mass production, chiefly of landscapes, hasty parodies of his style, and in their repetitiousness a mockery of realism. But his talent was not extinguished yet. Flashes of it still appeared in personal work, in portraits, animal studies, and still lifes. The Trout (1872, Kunsthaus, Zurich), the picture of a superb, glistening fish suspended by its gills and expiring, is a poignant image of captivity and death, and perhaps a final self-portrait.
Cared for by friends, still hoping to return to France, he gradually succumbed to heart and liver disease. After undergoing painful medical treatment, he died on 31 December 1877.
[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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