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While photographing other birds at one of the blinds at one of the water features at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, a buff bellied hummingbird arrived and gave me a relatively nice perch of which I was able to take a few pictures before it moved on.
Mientras observaba otras aves en una de las escondidas en una área con agua en La Reserva Nacional Laguna Atascosa, este colibrí yucateco llegó y se posó bonitamente por unos minutos.
Photographer: Aldo Carrera
Model: Savannah Weiser
MUA: Jospehine Chan
Hair: Nora Romick
Stylist: Alexandra Thurmond
Jean Honoré Fragonard - French, 1732 - 1806
A Game of Hot Cockles, c. 1775/1780
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 55
Towering, pale, celery-green trees frame a view of a lush park with about a dozen elegantly dressed, light-skinned men and women in this vertical landscape painting. The color palette is dominated by moss and lemon-lime green, golden yellow, and spruce blue. The men all wear jackets with long tails over knee-breeches, and their long hair is pulled back at the napes of their necks. The women wear long dresses with full skirts and hints of lace at the sleeves and bust, and their brown or white hair is pulled up. Nine of the men and women gather to our right on a stone terrace along the bottom edge of the painting. A man in butter yellow kneels in front of a woman wearing rose pink. Around this pair, people stand, kneel, sit, or recline wearing aquamarine blue, light turquoise, or ivory white. A man and woman sit on a bench to our left, a little removed from the larger group. This woman wears ruby red and the man leaning toward her wears topaz blue. Two people in the park beyond these groups are painted with only a few strokes of pale blue and white paint, and they look over a low hedge row lining the walking path. Beds of red flowers fill the lower corners of the composition in front of a statue of a woman to our left and a person, perhaps on a fountain, to our right. The grassy walking path and trees become more blue as they fade into the hazy distance between the tall tress to either side. The sky fades from pale blue along the horizon to a silvery blue, almost white, at the top.
As with so many of Fragonard’s paintings, the original destination of A Game of Horse and Rider [FIG. 1] and A Game of Hot Cockles remains mysterious; the paintings made their first public appearance only in the late nineteenth century.[1] They were undoubtedly intended as pendants, however, and meant to be installed in boiseries as part of a larger decorative program. The paintings are equal in size and have similar color schemes and compositions, and their subjects are perfectly complementary; each focuses on richly verdant gardens in which groups of figures have gathered to enjoy games in the outdoors. In style and theme they can be compared to the larger canvases of Blindman's Buff [FIG. 2] and The Swing [FIG. 3], works that include similar figures that appear in the present paintings. For example, the dashing couple — the man in blue suit, the woman in red dress, their white lapdog beside them — seated on the bench to the left of the game in Hot Cockles seem to have wandered over from The Swing, where we see them lounging at the left, about to dip a similar white dog into the fountain. Despite the differences in size, the four garden paintings in the National Gallery of Art were very likely painted about the same time, probably between 1775 and 1780.
The similarities among the four paintings have often been noted, but whether they were intended as part of the same decorative scheme that also included another monumental garden scene, Fête at Saint-Cloud [FIG. 4], is still an open question.[2] The figures in Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles are more carefully finished and richly detailed than those in the larger garden scenes, perhaps a function of their better state of preser-vation, with the impasto of the brushwork and the delicate glazes applied to the figures still mostly intact. Nevertheless, the canvases are probably fragments, as Jean-Pierre Cuzin first suggested.[3] The branches and trunks of the towering trees are somewhat arbitrarily cropped at the top edge, and technical evidence suggests that the paintings have been cut down.[4] The two paintings may originally have been much taller, perhaps equal in height to Blindman’s Buff, The Swing, and Fête at Saint-Cloud (about 216 cm). The resulting compositions, while extremely tall and narrow, would not have been unusual for decorative painting, which often was conceived to fit into established wall paneling.[5] Many garden scenes by Hubert Robert (French, 1733 - 1808), for example, combine a soaring landscape and cloud-filled skies with groups of figures occupying themselves in the lower section of the painting [FIG. 5].[6]
The games of blindman’s buff and swinging have remained popular with children today, but horse and rider and hot cockles may be less familiar. Yet both were common in Fragonard’s time, and they appear with some frequency in works of art produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[7] Fragonard’s paintings marvelously evoke the spirit of both activities. In Horse and Rider (in French the game is called “le cheval fondu,” or melted horse), the players have divided into two teams, one acting as a multilegged “horse,” bracing itself against a tree; the second team consists of “riders” who run and leap, one by one, onto the back of the “horse.” Once they are all aboard, the horse team tries to shake them off. In Fragonard’s painting two of the riders already seem to be losing their grip as they anticipate the charge of a teammate. Hot cockles (“la main chaude” or “frappe main”), by contrast, is a less physical game in which sleight of hand and close attention are rewarded. One player, the “penitent,” hides his face in the lap of a second (called the “confessor,” a referee who monitors the game) and places his hand flat behind his back. In turn, the other players slap the penitent on the hand, and he tries to identify who hit him. The player who lets himself be discovered becomes the penitent. This moment apparently is captured in the painting, as we see the penitent gesturing toward the person he has identified (either the standing woman in the light blue dress or the recoiling young man behind her). Fragonard records with his usual prescience the expressions, gestures, and body language that convey a sense of their amusement and absorption in the game.
The genesis of Fragonard’s paintings is as mysterious as their original purpose. Although the landscapes and figures in Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles are among the artist’s most accomplished inventions, no preparatory studies for them exist.[8] As with much of his oeuvre, it is as if Fragonard created them directly on the canvas, with little of the preparation and planning that one usually expects in such elaborate productions. Yet he did not invent these scenes out of whole cloth, for there was an established tradition for representing games in landscape settings; Fragonard undoubtedly had access to this tradition, and the National Gallery’s paintings are clearly indebted to it. For example, Fragonard certainly was aware of the series of prints representing games published by Jacques Stella (French, 1596 - 1657) and Gabriel Perelle (French, 1603 - 1677) in the seventeenth century [FIG. 6].[9] But, as with the larger canvases showing Blindman’s Buff and The Swing, the present paintings owe a debt to Jean-Baptiste Oudry (French, 1686 - 1755), whose designs for a tapestry cycle on the theme of Amusements champêtres include representations of Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles that are closely related to Fragonard’s compositions [FIG. 7].[10] Despite their extraordinary inventiveness and incomparable technical mastery, these paintings continue a convention of decorative pastoral art that has its roots in the fête galante of the earlier eighteenth century.
As with Fragonard’s larger garden paintings, the possible meanings of these games have been a matter of debate among scholars. We may wonder whether Fragonard’s intention was to invest them with allegorical or emblematic meaning or whether he used them merely to enliven a pair of decorative landscapes. As Colin Eisler pointed out, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (?1525 / 1530 – 1569) included boys playing horse and rider in his painting Children’s Games, which has been interpreted as an evocation of the folly of youth.[11] In Fragonard’s painting the rowdy play of the boys is juxtaposed with the older couple at the left, who, it is perhaps implied, enjoy a more adult game of flirtation. This activity is expanded upon in Hot Cockles, in which the amusement — like the related one of blindman’s buff — is an obvious allegory of courtship.[12] This interpretation is emphasized by the sculptures included in the scene: at the right edge, surmounting a pedestal with a carved relief of dancing figures, is Étienne Maurice Falconet’s (1716 – 1791) Menacing Cupid, who holds a finger to his lips. This work, exhibited at the Salon of 1757, had already been used by Fragonard in his early version of The Swing (London, Wallace Collection); here it plays a similar role of commenting on the proceedings, for the success of the game of hot cockles depends on the participants remaining discreet. It is balanced on the left by a second sculpture, which Eisler understood to represent an altar to love, similar to the one depicted in Jean Baptiste Greuze’s painting The Offering to Love of about 1767.[13]
In conceiving A Game of Horse and Rider and A Game of Hot Cockles, Fragonard clearly meant for the viewer to measure one painting against the other, and he invested the landscape settings with a greater significance than is apparent in Oudry’s tapestry designs. Each picture depicts a corner of a vast parkland, with figures playing in the foreground and a view deep into the center distance. With typical sophistication and wit, Fragonard placed the two amusements in settings that comment on and amplify the activities. As with Blindman’s Buff, The Swing, and Fête at Saint-Cloud, Fragonard contrasts two different styles of garden design popular in the eighteenth century — the picturesque and the formal — and populates them with suitable figures enjoying activities proper for their nature.[14] In Hot Cockles the game is played by elegantly dressed young adults in a formal garden, with clipped hedges, smooth parterres, potted trees, and discreetly placed sculptures. In Horse and Rider, by contrast, the garden is natural, with no signs of human manipulation; its principal motif is a gnarled and twisted tree that acts to support the rowdy horseplay of the youths. Their roughhousing is appropriate to the rugged ground on which they play, so different from the well-maintained parterre on which the demure game of Hot Cockles is enjoyed. Fragonard created internal points of contrast as well. The craggy contour of the tree at the right in Horse and Rider is distinguished from the graceful stand of birches at the left, just as the carousing youths are opposed to the well-dressed couple reclining nonchalantly on the ground. In each painting there are half-glimpsed views into the further reaches of the garden, suggestive of hidden attractions and intriguing corners yet to explore. Garden paths lead off in several directions in each painting. Hot Cockles is dominated by a principal central path, on which two women have stopped to admire an unseen view off to the right. In Horse and Rider a large river or basin occupies the middle ground, and in the distance a gondola, unloading a group of promenaders, can just be discerned. The original extreme verticality of these two paintings, with their towering trees and monumental skies, would have visually complemented the emphatically horizontal formats of Fête at Saint-Cloud and, when taken together, Blindman’s Buff and The Swing, works that articulate the vast expanse of the landscape rather than the infinite heights of the sky.
This text was previously published in Philip Conisbee et al., French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (Washington, DC, 2009), 188–194.
________________________________
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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Coastal Town of Honnavar
Kingdom:Animalia
Phylum:Chordata
Class:Reptilia
Order:Squamata
Suborder:Serpentes
Family:Colubridae
Subfamily:Natricinae
Genus:Amphiesma
Species:A. stolatum
Female buff-cheeked gibbon at Rare Species Conservation Centre, Kent.
Nomascus gabriellae (Thomas, 1909)
Hylobatidae
Primates
Buff-streaked Chat - Campicoloides bifasciatus - Зулусская каменка
Sani Pass, Mkhomazi Wilderness area, West of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 02/28/2021
trashwall buffed - the reaction on all the graficdesign was to create a buffed wall - because all the stuff inside the exhibition will be buffed after the show is over and in our opinion is the graficdesign in the "gallery" no streetart..
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Buff-tailed Coronet - Boissonneaua flavescens tinochlora - Бледнохвостый венценосец
San Jorge de Tandayapa Eco-Lodge, Tandayapa Valley, Ecuador, 09/07/2013
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