Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg

The floating world of The Black Pot, first shown in the round at the Garage Museum in Moscow and now reimagined and reconfigured as a room of interlocking screens, can be experienced from outside, as a looping stream of Rorschach inkblots, or from within, as a fluid, psychedelic environment, approximating a cocooned cosmos.

[everythingatonce.com]

Part of Everything at Once

Presented by Lisson Gallery and The Vinyl Factory at the Store Studios, 180 The Strand

October-December 2017

Lisson Gallery opened on Bell Street in 1967, a year after John Cage’s pronouncement on the changing conditions of contemporary existence. In celebration of this anniversary, the gallery is partnering with The Vinyl Factory to stage ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’, an ambitious group exhibition inspired by these words, which could very well apply to our current anxiety-ridden age of ceaseless communication. Through new and historical works by 24 of the artists currently shown by Lisson Gallery (out of more than 150 to have had solo shows over the past 50 years), this extensive presentation aims to collapse half a century of artistic endeavour under one roof, while telescoping its original aims into an unknowable future.

As Cage predicted, we increasingly live in an all-at-once age, in which time and space are no longer rational or linear concepts and great distances can be traversed with an instantaneous click. More than ever before, contemporary art, like life, assaults us simultaneously from all angles and from anywhere on the globe, existing also as multisensory visions of an accelerated world.

In response, ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’ is neither a chronological exhibition nor an encyclopaedic history of the gallery’s activities since 1967, rather it is an interconnected journey incorporating 45 works exploring experience, effect and event, invoking immediacy and immutability. Ranging from text to installation, painting, sculpture, performance and sound, the selection presents some of Lisson’s leading artists, of both the past and present...

[Lisson Gallery]

Seal Harbor, Mount Desert - 1893

George Henry Smillie

1840 - 1921

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

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Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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 "immutable servers" concept is a new approach to deployment. Instead of upgrading your servers, replace them with new ones. Likewise, instead of updating the code running on those servers, deploy it from scratch on new servers, and throw the old ones away.

By Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg (born 1949, UK) is one of the world’s foremost sculptors, constantly pushing to find new relations between people and the material world. In the 1980s, Cragg began to make sculptures suggestive of architecture, such as Minster, which recalls the spires of a cathedral, albeit built from scraps of rubber, stone, wood and metal.

These totemic piles of found objects and machined parts suggest an industrial counterpoint to the history of man-made achievements

[everythingatonce.com]

Part of Everything at Once

Presented by Lisson Gallery and The Vinyl Factory at the Store Studios, 180 The Strand

October-December 2017

Lisson Gallery opened on Bell Street in 1967, a year after John Cage’s pronouncement on the changing conditions of contemporary existence. In celebration of this anniversary, the gallery is partnering with The Vinyl Factory to stage ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’, an ambitious group exhibition inspired by these words, which could very well apply to our current anxiety-ridden age of ceaseless communication. Through new and historical works by 24 of the artists currently shown by Lisson Gallery (out of more than 150 to have had solo shows over the past 50 years), this extensive presentation aims to collapse half a century of artistic endeavour under one roof, while telescoping its original aims into an unknowable future.

As Cage predicted, we increasingly live in an all-at-once age, in which time and space are no longer rational or linear concepts and great distances can be traversed with an instantaneous click. More than ever before, contemporary art, like life, assaults us simultaneously from all angles and from anywhere on the globe, existing also as multisensory visions of an accelerated world.

In response, ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’ is neither a chronological exhibition nor an encyclopaedic history of the gallery’s activities since 1967, rather it is an interconnected journey incorporating 45 works exploring experience, effect and event, invoking immediacy and immutability. Ranging from text to installation, painting, sculpture, performance and sound, the selection presents some of Lisson’s leading artists, of both the past and present...

[Lisson Gallery]

The Shipwreck, 1772

Claude-Joseph Vernet

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 55

This dramatic scene is meant to evoke the “sublime,” a feeling that combines terror, awe, and delight. The small, frantic figures are overwhelmed by the violence of nature: the wind and waves and the jagged lightning bolt brightening the dark sky. Moonlight, the partner painting, presents a contrast: a calm, reassuring harbor, peacefully subdued by man-made architecture. Marine painting was popular in the 18th century, particularly in the British Empire, which maintained a powerful fleet of ships to secure its colonies around the globe. British aristocrats commissioned paired paintings from Vernet to decorate their country homes.

Claude-Joseph Vernet was one of the most famous landscape and marine painters in Europe during the second half of the 18th century. After his initial schooling in his native Avignon and in Aix-en-Provence, the 20-year-old artist traveled to Rome in 1734. He studied there for a brief time with the French-born marine painter Adrien Manglard, but quickly established his own reputation. Vernet made sketching trips in and around Rome and along the Mediterranean coast as far south as Naples, capturing scenes that provided the basic repertoire for the rest of his long career. He was soon sought after by Roman collectors, as well as by French diplomats in Italy and the many wealthy travelers from north of the Alps, especially the British making their Grand Tour. For these patrons Vernet painted views of Rome and Naples, and imaginary landscapes and coastal scenes—often in pairs or a set of four.

The Shipwreck epitomizes the type of marine subject for which Vernet was best known. It was commissioned, along with a pendant, Moonlight, by Lord Arundell in November 1771. The Shipwreck formed a dramatic contrast with the peaceful, moonlit coast scene, illustrating respectively the “sublime” (eliciting a sensation of horror in the spectator) and the “beautiful” (an agreeable and reposeful sensation), concepts that were much discussed in aesthetic discourse of the day. A ship flying a Dutch flag has foundered on a rocky seashore during a dramatic storm. Wind crashes the waves, bends a tree to breaking point, and sends clouds scudding across the sky, while a red zigzag crack of lightning illuminates a harbor town farther along the coast. Survivors from the wreck are distraught, exhausted, or just grateful to have clambered ashore. As the ship takes a final lurch against the rocks, desperate survivors slide down a rope in an attempt to reach the land. Shipwrecks were a real travel hazard in the 18th century, similar to automobile and plane crashes in our own time. Vernet painted the scene with lively brushwork, corresponding to the various effects of clouds, waves, and foam; his figures, however, were carefully and precisely rendered.

Claude-Joseph Vernet was born in Avignon in 1714, the son of Antoine Vernet (1689-1753), an artisan painter of architectural decorations, coach panels, and the like. He moved to the studio of Philippe Sauvan (1697-1792), a leading history painter in Avignon, and then worked with Jacques Viali (active 1681-1745), a decorative, landscape, and marine painter in Aix-en-Provence. Vernet's first recorded paintings were decorative overdoors executed in 1731 in the Aix townhouse of the marquise de Simiane. In 1734, Joseph de Seytres, marquis de Caumont, a leading amateur in Avignon, sponsored Vernet to make a study trip to Italy to complete his artistic education and to draw antiquities for his patron.

As Avignon was a papal territory in Vernet's day, he also had a number of useful introductions among influential churchmen when he arrived in Rome. Vernet was soon at home in the French community there, and he was encouraged by Nicolas Vleughels (1668-1737), director of the Académie de France in Rome, even though the young painter had no official affiliation with the royal institution. He likely entered the studio of the French marine painter Adrien Manglard (1695-1760). By 1740 Vernet was developing an independent reputation as a painter of topographical landscape in and around Rome and Naples, as well as of imaginary Italianate landscapes and marines, demonstrated by the increasing number of entries in his surviving account books from the mid-1730s onward. His first important patron in Rome was the French ambassador Paul Hippolyte de Beauvillier, duc de Saint-Aignan (1684-1776). This relationship set a pattern, and members of the French diplomatic corps and visiting French prelates remained important patrons during Vernet's long Roman sojourn, which lasted almost twenty years (he returned definitively to France in 1753). He also worked for the Roman nobility--for example, painting a series of major marines for Don Giacomo Borghese (Rome, Palazzo Borghese). But it was the British--the wealthiest travelers in Europe--who became Vernet's main patrons during their Grand Tours, purchasing Italianate landscapes and marines as souvenirs of their visits to Italy. The British remained enthusiastic patrons of Vernet, even long after his return to France.

The appeal of Vernet's art was twofold. On the one hand, he drew on the tradition of ideal landscape painting codified by Claude Lorrain (1604/1605-1682), Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Gaspard Dughet (1615-1675), and Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) in seventeenth-century Italy. Inspired by the landscape of the Roman Campagna and its surrounding hills, and by the coastline south to Naples, these artists had created appropriate landscape settings for narratives from ancient history or mythology, or in which the classically educated viewer could wander in his imagination. Vernet, on the other hand, brought to the study of nature a more empirical and closely observed approach, consistent with his times, creating what seemed to his contemporaries a more vivid and convincing impression of nature. This effect was enhanced by the fact that he usually conceived his pictures in pairs, or even sets of four, which showed dramatically contrasting aspects of nature. Having established these kinds of paintings as successful formulas by the mid-1740s, Vernet continued to supply a European demand for them for the rest of his career. Vernet first exhibited typical landscapes and marines at the Paris Salon of 1746, the year his membership in the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture was approved. He became a full member in 1753 and exhibited successfully at the Salon for the rest of his life. He had come to the attention of Louis XV's administration in 1746, and in 1753 he was finally called back to France to begin an official commission to paint large topographical views of the principal commercial and military seaports of the realm. This commission took him on an arduous itinerary, from Antibes in the south to Dieppe in the north, from 1753 until 1765, during which time he completed fifteen large paintings. Vernet's "Ports of France" (Paris, Musée du Louvre) are among the greatest French paintings of the mid-eighteenth century, for they are both remarkable social and historical documents of contemporary port life, full of fascinating observation, and at the same time beautifully composed and rendered works of art.

Vernet continued a large production of imaginary landscape and marine paintings until his death on the eve of the French Revolution in 1789. He was one of the most acclaimed and successful artists in France, and he received commissions from every corner of Europe. The public and critics alike admired his art, and the great writer and critic Denis Diderot (1713-1784) eulogized him. Diderot especially admired Vernet's dramatic scenes of shipwrecks, which perfectly illustrate the contemporary concept of the Sublime, expressing with horror the ephemeral quality of human endeavor before the immutable power of nature.

________________________________

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...

.

Six Characters in Search of an Author

Adapted from Luigi Pirandello by Ben Power and Rupert Goold

26-30 March, 7:30. Adam House Theatre.

'We are more than real. We are unchanging, immutable, fixed. We are what we have been made to be.'

Tickets available at xtspro.com/-/six-characters-in-search-of-an-author/

A comprehended God is no God.

— St John Chrysostom

Typeface: Roswell

Merchandise available: www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/141292686

requirement 2 Large depth of field

"The sun doesn't change just like God"

My girls

By Dan Graham

Through the presence of people within these geometric forms, his pavilions investigate notions of inclusion and exclusion. Two V’s Entrance-Way – one of Graham’s largest and most ambitious pavilions to date – engages not only with the Brutalist surroundings and the glass atrium but also with visitors to the exhibition, drawing attention to the way in which buildings can act as instruments of expression, psychological strongholds, markers of social change as well as prisms through which we view ourselves and others.

[everythingatonce.com]

Part of Everything at Once

Presented by Lisson Gallery and The Vinyl Factory at the Store Studios, 180 The Strand

October-December 2017

Lisson Gallery opened on Bell Street in 1967, a year after John Cage’s pronouncement on the changing conditions of contemporary existence. In celebration of this anniversary, the gallery is partnering with The Vinyl Factory to stage ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’, an ambitious group exhibition inspired by these words, which could very well apply to our current anxiety-ridden age of ceaseless communication. Through new and historical works by 24 of the artists currently shown by Lisson Gallery (out of more than 150 to have had solo shows over the past 50 years), this extensive presentation aims to collapse half a century of artistic endeavour under one roof, while telescoping its original aims into an unknowable future.

As Cage predicted, we increasingly live in an all-at-once age, in which time and space are no longer rational or linear concepts and great distances can be traversed with an instantaneous click. More than ever before, contemporary art, like life, assaults us simultaneously from all angles and from anywhere on the globe, existing also as multisensory visions of an accelerated world.

In response, ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’ is neither a chronological exhibition nor an encyclopaedic history of the gallery’s activities since 1967, rather it is an interconnected journey incorporating 45 works exploring experience, effect and event, invoking immediacy and immutability. Ranging from text to installation, painting, sculpture, performance and sound, the selection presents some of Lisson’s leading artists, of both the past and present...

[Lisson Gallery]

This portrait shows the king dominating the attributes of the arts (music, painting, drawing and the globe) and for all eternity, as is suggested by the immutable nature of his effigy in the medallion.

Source: Château de Versailles

collections.chateauversailles.fr/?permid=permobj_5d962739...

The Shipwreck, 1772

Claude-Joseph Vernet

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 55

This dramatic scene is meant to evoke the “sublime,” a feeling that combines terror, awe, and delight. The small, frantic figures are overwhelmed by the violence of nature: the wind and waves and the jagged lightning bolt brightening the dark sky. Moonlight, the partner painting, presents a contrast: a calm, reassuring harbor, peacefully subdued by man-made architecture. Marine painting was popular in the 18th century, particularly in the British Empire, which maintained a powerful fleet of ships to secure its colonies around the globe. British aristocrats commissioned paired paintings from Vernet to decorate their country homes.

Claude-Joseph Vernet was one of the most famous landscape and marine painters in Europe during the second half of the 18th century. After his initial schooling in his native Avignon and in Aix-en-Provence, the 20-year-old artist traveled to Rome in 1734. He studied there for a brief time with the French-born marine painter Adrien Manglard, but quickly established his own reputation. Vernet made sketching trips in and around Rome and along the Mediterranean coast as far south as Naples, capturing scenes that provided the basic repertoire for the rest of his long career. He was soon sought after by Roman collectors, as well as by French diplomats in Italy and the many wealthy travelers from north of the Alps, especially the British making their Grand Tour. For these patrons Vernet painted views of Rome and Naples, and imaginary landscapes and coastal scenes—often in pairs or a set of four.

The Shipwreck epitomizes the type of marine subject for which Vernet was best known. It was commissioned, along with a pendant, Moonlight, by Lord Arundell in November 1771. The Shipwreck formed a dramatic contrast with the peaceful, moonlit coast scene, illustrating respectively the “sublime” (eliciting a sensation of horror in the spectator) and the “beautiful” (an agreeable and reposeful sensation), concepts that were much discussed in aesthetic discourse of the day. A ship flying a Dutch flag has foundered on a rocky seashore during a dramatic storm. Wind crashes the waves, bends a tree to breaking point, and sends clouds scudding across the sky, while a red zigzag crack of lightning illuminates a harbor town farther along the coast. Survivors from the wreck are distraught, exhausted, or just grateful to have clambered ashore. As the ship takes a final lurch against the rocks, desperate survivors slide down a rope in an attempt to reach the land. Shipwrecks were a real travel hazard in the 18th century, similar to automobile and plane crashes in our own time. Vernet painted the scene with lively brushwork, corresponding to the various effects of clouds, waves, and foam; his figures, however, were carefully and precisely rendered.

Claude-Joseph Vernet was born in Avignon in 1714, the son of Antoine Vernet (1689-1753), an artisan painter of architectural decorations, coach panels, and the like. He moved to the studio of Philippe Sauvan (1697-1792), a leading history painter in Avignon, and then worked with Jacques Viali (active 1681-1745), a decorative, landscape, and marine painter in Aix-en-Provence. Vernet's first recorded paintings were decorative overdoors executed in 1731 in the Aix townhouse of the marquise de Simiane. In 1734, Joseph de Seytres, marquis de Caumont, a leading amateur in Avignon, sponsored Vernet to make a study trip to Italy to complete his artistic education and to draw antiquities for his patron.

As Avignon was a papal territory in Vernet's day, he also had a number of useful introductions among influential churchmen when he arrived in Rome. Vernet was soon at home in the French community there, and he was encouraged by Nicolas Vleughels (1668-1737), director of the Académie de France in Rome, even though the young painter had no official affiliation with the royal institution. He likely entered the studio of the French marine painter Adrien Manglard (1695-1760). By 1740 Vernet was developing an independent reputation as a painter of topographical landscape in and around Rome and Naples, as well as of imaginary Italianate landscapes and marines, demonstrated by the increasing number of entries in his surviving account books from the mid-1730s onward. His first important patron in Rome was the French ambassador Paul Hippolyte de Beauvillier, duc de Saint-Aignan (1684-1776). This relationship set a pattern, and members of the French diplomatic corps and visiting French prelates remained important patrons during Vernet's long Roman sojourn, which lasted almost twenty years (he returned definitively to France in 1753). He also worked for the Roman nobility--for example, painting a series of major marines for Don Giacomo Borghese (Rome, Palazzo Borghese). But it was the British--the wealthiest travelers in Europe--who became Vernet's main patrons during their Grand Tours, purchasing Italianate landscapes and marines as souvenirs of their visits to Italy. The British remained enthusiastic patrons of Vernet, even long after his return to France.

The appeal of Vernet's art was twofold. On the one hand, he drew on the tradition of ideal landscape painting codified by Claude Lorrain (1604/1605-1682), Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Gaspard Dughet (1615-1675), and Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) in seventeenth-century Italy. Inspired by the landscape of the Roman Campagna and its surrounding hills, and by the coastline south to Naples, these artists had created appropriate landscape settings for narratives from ancient history or mythology, or in which the classically educated viewer could wander in his imagination. Vernet, on the other hand, brought to the study of nature a more empirical and closely observed approach, consistent with his times, creating what seemed to his contemporaries a more vivid and convincing impression of nature. This effect was enhanced by the fact that he usually conceived his pictures in pairs, or even sets of four, which showed dramatically contrasting aspects of nature. Having established these kinds of paintings as successful formulas by the mid-1740s, Vernet continued to supply a European demand for them for the rest of his career. Vernet first exhibited typical landscapes and marines at the Paris Salon of 1746, the year his membership in the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture was approved. He became a full member in 1753 and exhibited successfully at the Salon for the rest of his life. He had come to the attention of Louis XV's administration in 1746, and in 1753 he was finally called back to France to begin an official commission to paint large topographical views of the principal commercial and military seaports of the realm. This commission took him on an arduous itinerary, from Antibes in the south to Dieppe in the north, from 1753 until 1765, during which time he completed fifteen large paintings. Vernet's "Ports of France" (Paris, Musée du Louvre) are among the greatest French paintings of the mid-eighteenth century, for they are both remarkable social and historical documents of contemporary port life, full of fascinating observation, and at the same time beautifully composed and rendered works of art.

Vernet continued a large production of imaginary landscape and marine paintings until his death on the eve of the French Revolution in 1789. He was one of the most acclaimed and successful artists in France, and he received commissions from every corner of Europe. The public and critics alike admired his art, and the great writer and critic Denis Diderot (1713-1784) eulogized him. Diderot especially admired Vernet's dramatic scenes of shipwrecks, which perfectly illustrate the contemporary concept of the Sublime, expressing with horror the ephemeral quality of human endeavor before the immutable power of nature.

________________________________

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...

.

Constitution Island and Foundry from West

Point, New York - c. 1837

Seth Eastman

American, 1808 - 1875

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

Constitution Island and Foundry from West

Point, New York - c. 1837

Seth Eastman

American, 1808 - 1875

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

By Ai Weiwei

Part of Everything at Once

Presented by Lisson Gallery and The Vinyl Factory at the Store Studios, 180 The Strand

October-December 2017

Lisson Gallery opened on Bell Street in 1967, a year after John Cage’s pronouncement on the changing conditions of contemporary existence. In celebration of this anniversary, the gallery is partnering with The Vinyl Factory to stage ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’, an ambitious group exhibition inspired by these words, which could very well apply to our current anxiety-ridden age of ceaseless communication. Through new and historical works by 24 of the artists currently shown by Lisson Gallery (out of more than 150 to have had solo shows over the past 50 years), this extensive presentation aims to collapse half a century of artistic endeavour under one roof, while telescoping its original aims into an unknowable future.

As Cage predicted, we increasingly live in an all-at-once age, in which time and space are no longer rational or linear concepts and great distances can be traversed with an instantaneous click. More than ever before, contemporary art, like life, assaults us simultaneously from all angles and from anywhere on the globe, existing also as multisensory visions of an accelerated world.

In response, ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’ is neither a chronological exhibition nor an encyclopaedic history of the gallery’s activities since 1967, rather it is an interconnected journey incorporating 45 works exploring experience, effect and event, invoking immediacy and immutability. Ranging from text to installation, painting, sculpture, performance and sound, the selection presents some of Lisson’s leading artists, of both the past and present...

[Lisson Gallery]

By Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg (born 1949, UK) is one of the world’s foremost sculptors, constantly pushing to find new relations between people and the material world. In the 1980s, Cragg began to make sculptures suggestive of architecture, such as Minster, which recalls the spires of a cathedral, albeit built from scraps of rubber, stone, wood and metal.

These totemic piles of found objects and machined parts suggest an industrial counterpoint to the history of man-made achievements

[everythingatonce.com]

Part of Everything at Once

Presented by Lisson Gallery and The Vinyl Factory at the Store Studios, 180 The Strand

October-December 2017

Lisson Gallery opened on Bell Street in 1967, a year after John Cage’s pronouncement on the changing conditions of contemporary existence. In celebration of this anniversary, the gallery is partnering with The Vinyl Factory to stage ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’, an ambitious group exhibition inspired by these words, which could very well apply to our current anxiety-ridden age of ceaseless communication. Through new and historical works by 24 of the artists currently shown by Lisson Gallery (out of more than 150 to have had solo shows over the past 50 years), this extensive presentation aims to collapse half a century of artistic endeavour under one roof, while telescoping its original aims into an unknowable future.

As Cage predicted, we increasingly live in an all-at-once age, in which time and space are no longer rational or linear concepts and great distances can be traversed with an instantaneous click. More than ever before, contemporary art, like life, assaults us simultaneously from all angles and from anywhere on the globe, existing also as multisensory visions of an accelerated world.

In response, ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’ is neither a chronological exhibition nor an encyclopaedic history of the gallery’s activities since 1967, rather it is an interconnected journey incorporating 45 works exploring experience, effect and event, invoking immediacy and immutability. Ranging from text to installation, painting, sculpture, performance and sound, the selection presents some of Lisson’s leading artists, of both the past and present...

[Lisson Gallery]

Three Landscapes - 1974

Saul Steinberg

American, born Romania, 1914 - 1999

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

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Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

Anyone who follows emerging technology knows that the concept of blockchain development is fraught with ambiguity. Blockchain technology is essentially a self-sustaining and self-governing database. A blockchain development, in greater detail, is a decentralized data structure of transactional records that assures security, transparency, and immutability (the ability to change records). At EnclaveFX Technologies, they offer top-notch blockchain development services including Contracts with Intelligence, Tokenization, ICO, Exchange, Coins, etc.

URL:

enclavefxtechno.com/

By Ai Weiwei

Part of Everything at Once

Presented by Lisson Gallery and The Vinyl Factory at the Store Studios, 180 The Strand

October-December 2017

Lisson Gallery opened on Bell Street in 1967, a year after John Cage’s pronouncement on the changing conditions of contemporary existence. In celebration of this anniversary, the gallery is partnering with The Vinyl Factory to stage ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’, an ambitious group exhibition inspired by these words, which could very well apply to our current anxiety-ridden age of ceaseless communication. Through new and historical works by 24 of the artists currently shown by Lisson Gallery (out of more than 150 to have had solo shows over the past 50 years), this extensive presentation aims to collapse half a century of artistic endeavour under one roof, while telescoping its original aims into an unknowable future.

As Cage predicted, we increasingly live in an all-at-once age, in which time and space are no longer rational or linear concepts and great distances can be traversed with an instantaneous click. More than ever before, contemporary art, like life, assaults us simultaneously from all angles and from anywhere on the globe, existing also as multisensory visions of an accelerated world.

In response, ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’ is neither a chronological exhibition nor an encyclopaedic history of the gallery’s activities since 1967, rather it is an interconnected journey incorporating 45 works exploring experience, effect and event, invoking immediacy and immutability. Ranging from text to installation, painting, sculpture, performance and sound, the selection presents some of Lisson’s leading artists, of both the past and present...

[Lisson Gallery]

Data and technology play more critical roles in the whole lifecycle of cost management. quantity surveyors need to catch up with the digitalisation trend in the construction industry.

Glodon company limited recently talked with Bola Abisogun OBE, the Founder and Chairman of DiverseCity Surveyors and an elected Fellow of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

In the talk, we discussed policies and regulations on quantity surveying, data and technology application, information sharing and collaboration, vocational skills, sustainable development, etc. We tried to shed light on the opportunities and challenges encountered by quantity surveyors in the construction industry's digital transformation in construction process while exploring solutions for the coordinated development of people, organisations, industry, and technology.

What follows are highlights of the talk, edited and condensed for clarity.

Glodon: the UK introduced the concept of golden thread and the new Building Safety Act. How do you think the golden thread and government policy or regulation will lead to the digital transformation of quantity surveying in the UK and the global market?

Bola: Because of what happened at Grenfell tower and the lack of knowledge of detail as to who did what, when, and why, Dame Hackitt led a report called Building a Safer Future. One of the recommendations in that report was to mandate legally, that asset owners/accountable persons/duty holders with high-rise residential buildings would be legally required to demonstrate and evidence the golden thread.

The golden thread means different things to different people at the moment. But in my mind, the golden thread is all about understanding how the building was designed, built, and maintained during its entire lifecycle, and also providing information and advice for users of the building to understand how the building should be working. The golden thread has to be created in a digital format. It has to be maintained in a digital format, and it has to be shared and enabled as an interoperable layer in a digital format.

So the fact that the only way to succeed with the golden thread is to unlock digital transformation in historical analogue processes, will 'force' the cultural change required, which I believe, for the sector is to shift from two dimensions to potentially five dimensions.

Glodon: How does the golden thread affect the future potential of the quantity surveyors?

Bola: It's all about data. Quantity surveyors historically have only ever managed data. Data from engineers, architects, clients, product manufacturers, and contractors. But, quantity surveyors have to now evolve from cost to value.

I believe that the quantity surveyor is well placed now to become a strategic advisor in so many other ways. We have to raise our game around what we have done. The value we are adding to projects, not only from a cost measurement and quantification basis but also now moving into the net zero and decarbonisation agenda, along with increasingly important ESG requirements. We need to think about our role in demonstrating value for the new client's agenda. And the role of technology and, specifically, the role of digital twins in that solution will become more prevalent over time.

Clients now are asking for more challenging requirements through their projects. They want more data, evidence, insights, and value. So the role of the quantity surveyor is at a crossroads today.

Glodon: Data is said to be the new gold of the industry which is of great importance in enabling and empowering transformation in quantity surveying. SMEs rely heavily on their historical data, possessing a significant disadvantage in data accuracy. What's your opinion on the inaccuracy of data existing in the industry?

Bola: In construction claims management, historical project data is relevant. But if it's not structured, it has no value. So the role of historical cost data in determining future or current project cost, not value, is skewed to some degree. It can only give, at best, a percentage of accuracy. If you value a project today, there are all these risks below the line that haven't yet been quantified and measured, which is always the case with the quantity surveyor. How do you bring certainty based on historical data to the unknown costs currently sitting within the cost plan you give to your client? All the current variables below the line have a risk of changing the minute you present them.

The question is when using historical cost data can you capture the changing cost drivers within 24 seconds of previously advising a client? It's never been possible to do that. But today, in 2022, with the level of technology and the tools that we have, it should be possible for every consultant to capture such detail, the real and at the right time, the movement of cost based on the composition of the design estimate. So when you think about the role of historical cost data, it has a role, but the role is not 100%. In order to get to 100%, ideally, you need to use technology to help you predict the different outcomes that you can't price, cost, and manage in 2D.

The first thing most clients say is how confident you are in the numbers you have presented. And that is when you find a quantity surveyor begins to talk about the risks and the unknown costs in the number submitted. So the role of technology, in my mind, is going to reduce the risks associated with every number that says the project is going to cost X plus.

We need to move to a point where we are fusing historical cost data with predictive cost data based on models of risk around the world that correlate with and pick up what is going on in supply chains in various countries and rely upon the competency of the professional design team and all other risks that have an impact on the whole-life construction cost. That is why we need to think not only about the role of historic cost data but the role of predictive cost data and the relationship between the two.

Glodon: In what way can the quantity surveying industry better collaborate? What is the best scenario for collaboration?

Bola: The biggest challenge we have with collaboration is not that the sector cannot do it; the challenge is how do we create trust. There is very little trust between the various actors, notoriously between clients and their professional design teams. So, in order to collaborate, we need to trust each other more. We have to remove the human emotion of prejudice and bias and develop the human capability to trust each other. We need to create technology solutions that foster trusting behaviours; such as digital twin and other distributed ledger-type technologies like blockchain.

I come back to solutions like the digital twin because the digital twin environment creates an opportunity for all stakeholders to become 'visible to each other. So if I make a change to my project workflow and I do not tell you, the system will tell you. It's all very transparent. There are very basic level conversations that do not foster trust in the industry, and the biggest consequence of a lack of collaboration, particularly on big data, is the fact that the trust in the data isn't there in the first place. Where does the data come from? Who put the data together? Is the data free? Is the data payable? All these are valid questions that either build or destroy trust between parties.

And on the collaboration piece, the question is, do I take away from my competitive advantage if I share my data with you? And it's a tougher question the higher and the bigger the business is. So, sharing data as a micro business is relatively straightforward. Sharing data as a big business is 'potentially' a real problem. And sharing data between big business and micro business is almost impossible, from a lived experience.

So, cultural change is required here And everywhere across the value chain. It's not entirely about the technology. It's about the people. The lack of collaboration within and across the industry is a people-centric challenge. It is not just a, but technology has a significant role to play in the available, scaleable and sustainable solution.

I will now come back to the tragedy of Grenfell tower. A blockchain solution can do two things: it gives clarity to any third party that wants to investigate what's happened from an audit perspective, and it also gives a level of trust because the data is immutable to all parties, and it gives transparency and accountability. If we can introduce trust, transparency, and accountability in a big data environment, it will unlock the cultural change required to 'force and sustain' collaboration.

Glodon: Technologies like blockchain, big data, and digital twins are emerging. What are preparations needed before we can cash in on their full potential?

Bola: What needs to happen for the role of technology to really flourish is the 154-year-old business model of the quantity surveyor needs to change. We need to recreate a new business model that talks about the new ways of sharing and creating data. And then align the skill set of the quantity surveyor, cost manager, and commercial manager to the new skills required. We need to then produce a new business offer to the public citizen and other key client groups that want to continue to pay for a professional service in the sphere of cost management.

And to me, it is aligned to the whole concept of working in cloud-based solutions, working in common data environments, using BIM-enabled, data-driven workflows, to foster better information management, deploying digital twin solutions, and using APIs, to share data. That's a new business model and one that I have been working on since I graduated from university in 1994.

However, the bigger issue is the fact that the digital skills maturity of every professional isn't high enough. Right now, every professional, at least every quantity surveyor, should think about skilling or reskilling with a focus on digital and people skills. Unless that happens, the change we need to see won't be sustainable. Clients that are asking for better and more meaningful, measurable outcomes will begin to force the change by asking for metrics that are aligned to, for example, ESG funding models and deliverables. And to do that well, you are going to need to use solutions like digital twins. So this is a very layered perspective that the industry needs to think about. But it starts with the uptake of digital skills.

Glodon: What specific skills and knowledge will be essential for the professionals in the future if they are the new embracers or the supporters of new technologies?

Bola: The first skill I think to be acquired is humility. Quantity surveyors need to recognise what they can do well and what they don't do well. And they need to be open and honest about where they go for solutions. In 2022, we cannot maintain our role as an individual, only as value-creating, empathetic team players.

Most of the skills required for the quantity surveyor, aside from the obvious digital skills, are emotional, critical thinking, empathy, and strategic team-building skills. Soft skills that make people better manage others and themselves. It's something that comes over time. But those are the bigger skills because we are going to become less of a technician and more an advisor. And to be a great advisor, you have to understand people and recognise their emotions. That is why I see a big move towards emotional intelligence and people skills becoming much more relevant and then, becoming fused and better managed with the technology side because our technical role has been, and will continue to be, augmented by technology.

It's about people; it all comes back to people.

Glodon: Sustainability and carbon neutrality is an urgent task that calls for a global effort. Does digitalisation in quantity surveying offer hope and solutions to reduce carbon emissions?

Bola: The role of carbon measurement sits very well with the traditional quantity surveyor, but it will require different skills and a different understanding and appreciation of the risks associated with carbon measurement and the construction process. I believe it's an evolution of the traditional role, but it is not entirely about measurement. It's more about interpretation and advice on risks associated with the process, everything from the inception of the design, construction, and handover beyond construction. The real challenge and the real opportunity for carbon measurement are in occupied buildings. Is the building functioning and operating in the right way? That's the key and critical question. And from my vast experience, the best professional to oversee that process and/or audit is the quantity surveyor or 'digital' cost manager.

Glodon: How do you think the role of enterprises such as Glodon to play in the digital transformation of the quantity surveying industry and in the evolving of the future role of quantity surveyors?

Bola: This is a perfect opportunity for successful entities like Glodon to lead the digital transformation agenda. But in order to do that well, we have to disrupt the sector. We have to disrupt the current status quo. Cultural change will not happen with people alone, but it can and will happen with technology-led, people-centric solutions. With your investment in digital twins, big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain, etc., you are now well gifted to position yourselves as an innovator and think about your future role, and what digitally enabled services you can offer that add value to the professional Quantity Surveyor / Cost & Commercial Manager and also, create important and much-needed value for clients. You can help to address some of the pressing problems for quantity surveying today. For example, cost overruns, are among the biggest issues in the UK construction industry, which could be caused by inaccurate project requirements, poor communication, lack of collaboration, undefined risks, and preliminary cost estimates based on scant design information; the inaccuracy of project data across the project life cycle and value chain; along with the 'age-old' professional discipline working in silos, hampers the very fragmented way of delivering projects. It is time to be bold and lead the trajectory of a wholly collaborative and seamless project delivery model, driven by people with real-time / right-time datasets.

www.glodon.com/en/articles/evoving-role-quantity-surveyor...

Part of Everything at Once

Presented by Lisson Gallery and The Vinyl Factory at the Store Studios, 180 The Strand

October-December 2017

Lisson Gallery opened on Bell Street in 1967, a year after John Cage’s pronouncement on the changing conditions of contemporary existence. In celebration of this anniversary, the gallery is partnering with The Vinyl Factory to stage ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’, an ambitious group exhibition inspired by these words, which could very well apply to our current anxiety-ridden age of ceaseless communication. Through new and historical works by 24 of the artists currently shown by Lisson Gallery (out of more than 150 to have had solo shows over the past 50 years), this extensive presentation aims to collapse half a century of artistic endeavour under one roof, while telescoping its original aims into an unknowable future.

As Cage predicted, we increasingly live in an all-at-once age, in which time and space are no longer rational or linear concepts and great distances can be traversed with an instantaneous click. More than ever before, contemporary art, like life, assaults us simultaneously from all angles and from anywhere on the globe, existing also as multisensory visions of an accelerated world.

In response, ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’ is neither a chronological exhibition nor an encyclopaedic history of the gallery’s activities since 1967, rather it is an interconnected journey incorporating 45 works exploring experience, effect and event, invoking immediacy and immutability. Ranging from text to installation, painting, sculpture, performance and sound, the selection presents some of Lisson’s leading artists, of both the past and present...

[Lisson Gallery]

In Python, string is an immutable sequence data type. It is the sequence of Unicode characters wrapped inside single, double, or triple quotes.

The Waterfall - 1860s-1870s

John William Hill

American, 1812 - 1879

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

A feature length documentary work which presents a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society. This subject matter will transcend the issues of cultural relativism and traditional ideology and move to relate the core, empirical "life ground" attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a "Resource-Based Economy"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w&

How about stability rather than immutability? A “people” as I use the term is defined by a common way of life. A common way of life that deals reasonably well with the various stages, chances, and situations in life for various types of people takes generations to grow up. It involves a whole lot of accumulated experiences, common habits, memories, loyalties, and understandings, and overlapping networks of personal ties. Those don’t appear overnight.

Dunno about “violence” and “technocratic engineering.” the arrival of the Sea Peoples in the late Bronze Age and beginning of the Migration Period in Late Antiquity didn’t lead to periods of peace, prosperity, and high culture. City walls have been around for quite a while, and if they’re technocratic engineering maybe it’s not always a bad thing. - James Kalb

- Open the borders?

"It involves a whole lot of accumulated experiences, common habits, memories, loyalties, and understandings, and overlapping networks of personal ties. Those don’t appear overnight."

Ja, det er enklere å rive ned enn å bygge opp, sies det, og dette gjelder ikke minst kultur. Pussig å tenke på at disse felles vanene, minnene, lojalitetene (som til vår apostel), forståelsene, som våre forfedre bygde opp over generasjoner, og som kulminerte i husmannstroen, nå er borte. Og med borte mener jeg totalt blåst vekk, jeg forsøker å fange noen av de siste fargene, men det er ikke lett. Nå har ingen felles vaner lenger, hverken i enga, grenda eller slekta, vi har ikke lenger noen felles hukommelse eller minner, vi har alle og enhver motstridende forståelser av virkeligheten, ingen kjenner lenger noen som helst slags lojalitet til noen, og aller minst til våre forfedre og tradisjonene, og jeg har ikke igjen personlige bånd til noen, hverken i grenda eller i slekta, med et lite unntak av en onkel.

Alt har vi overlatt til "...schools, daycare, fast food, therapists, big corporations, and government social services, so we don’t need families or communities." Så slik gikk det med grenda til Totenåsens apostel og husmannstroens barn, til 100-års jubileet for stabburet etter oldefar. I sannhet en vidunderlig vakker, uendelig vemodig gravstein over husmannstroen!

Med disse ord av James Kalb, avslutter jeg Hårdåg i engen V.

How about stability rather than immutability? A “people” as I use the term is defined by a common way of life. A common way of life that deals reasonably well with the various stages, chances, and situations in life for various types of people takes generations to grow up. It involves a whole lot of accumulated experiences, common habits, memories, loyalties, and understandings, and overlapping networks of personal ties. Those don’t appear overnight.

Dunno about “violence” and “technocratic engineering.” the arrival of the Sea Peoples in the late Bronze Age and beginning of the Migration Period in Late Antiquity didn’t lead to periods of peace, prosperity, and high culture. City walls have been around for quite a while, and if they’re technocratic engineering maybe it’s not always a bad thing. - James Kalb

- Open the borders?

"It involves a whole lot of accumulated experiences, common habits, memories, loyalties, and understandings, and overlapping networks of personal ties. Those don’t appear overnight."

Ja, det er enklere å rive ned enn å bygge opp, sies det, og dette gjelder ikke minst kultur. Pussig å tenke på at disse felles vanene, minnene, lojalitetene (som til vår apostel), forståelsene, som våre forfedre bygde opp over generasjoner, og som kulminerte i husmannstroen, nå er borte. Og med borte mener jeg totalt blåst vekk, jeg forsøker å fange noen av de siste fargene, men det er ikke lett. Nå har ingen felles vaner lenger, hverken i enga, grenda eller slekta, vi har ikke lenger noen felles hukommelse eller minner, vi har alle og enhver motstridende forståelser av virkeligheten, ingen kjenner lenger noen som helst slags lojalitet til noen, og aller minst til våre forfedre og tradisjonene, og jeg har ikke igjen personlige bånd til noen, hverken i grenda eller i slekta, med et lite unntak av en onkel.

Alt har vi overlatt til "...schools, daycare, fast food, therapists, big corporations, and government social services, so we don’t need families or communities." Så slik gikk det med grenda til Totenåsens apostel og husmannstroens barn, til 100-års jubileet for stabburet etter oldefar. I sannhet en vidunderlig vakker, uendelig vemodig gravstein over husmannstroen!

Med disse ord av James Kalb, avslutter jeg Hårdåg i engen V.

Six Characters in Search of an Author

Adapted from Luigi Pirandello by Ben Power and Rupert Goold

26-30 March, 7:30. Adam House Theatre.

'We are more than real. We are unchanging, immutable, fixed. We are what we have been made to be.'

Tickets available at xtspro.com/-/six-characters-in-search-of-an-author/

How about stability rather than immutability? A “people” as I use the term is defined by a common way of life. A common way of life that deals reasonably well with the various stages, chances, and situations in life for various types of people takes generations to grow up. It involves a whole lot of accumulated experiences, common habits, memories, loyalties, and understandings, and overlapping networks of personal ties. Those don’t appear overnight.

Dunno about “violence” and “technocratic engineering.” the arrival of the Sea Peoples in the late Bronze Age and beginning of the Migration Period in Late Antiquity didn’t lead to periods of peace, prosperity, and high culture. City walls have been around for quite a while, and if they’re technocratic engineering maybe it’s not always a bad thing. - James Kalb

- Open the borders?

"It involves a whole lot of accumulated experiences, common habits, memories, loyalties, and understandings, and overlapping networks of personal ties. Those don’t appear overnight."

Ja, det er enklere å rive ned enn å bygge opp, sies det, og dette gjelder ikke minst kultur. Pussig å tenke på at disse felles vanene, minnene, lojalitetene (som til vår apostel), forståelsene, som våre forfedre bygde opp over generasjoner, og som kulminerte i husmannstroen, nå er borte. Og med borte mener jeg totalt blåst vekk, jeg forsøker å fange noen av de siste fargene, men det er ikke lett. Nå har ingen felles vaner lenger, hverken i enga, grenda eller slekta, vi har ikke lenger noen felles hukommelse eller minner, vi har alle og enhver motstridende forståelser av virkeligheten, ingen kjenner lenger noen som helst slags lojalitet til noen, og aller minst til våre forfedre og tradisjonene, og jeg har ikke igjen personlige bånd til noen, hverken i grenda eller i slekta, med et lite unntak av en onkel.

Alt har vi overlatt til "...schools, daycare, fast food, therapists, big corporations, and government social services, so we don’t need families or communities." Så slik gikk det med grenda til Totenåsens apostel og husmannstroens barn, til 100-års jubileet for stabburet etter oldefar. I sannhet en vidunderlig vakker, uendelig vemodig gravstein over husmannstroen!

Med disse ord av James Kalb, avslutter jeg Hårdåg i engen V.

.

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

Winter - c. 1927

Wilson Irvine

American, 1869 - 1936

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

A comprehended God is no God.

— St John Chrysostom

Typeface: Roswell

Merchandise available: www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/141293272

The dorje represents the impenetrable, unmovable, immutable, indivisible, and indestructible state of Buddhahood.

Swayambbu Temple is up on a hill with amazing views of Kathmandu. It is colloquially known as the "Monkey Temple"

Impression of the Plains - c. 1927

Wilson Irvine

American, 1869 - 1936

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

By Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg (born 1949, UK) is one of the world’s foremost sculptors, constantly pushing to find new relations between people and the material world. In the 1980s, Cragg began to make sculptures suggestive of architecture...

These totemic piles of found objects and machined parts suggest an industrial counterpoint to the history of man-made achievements, while his other work nearby, Tools, made from sandstone, conveys the opposite, being hand wrought versions of mechanical aids, such as screwdrivers and mallets. Cragg sees no difference between the natural and the artificial, preferring to acknowledge the bridges between the two, the synthetic here acquiring figurative qualities in some of the bust-like tools, while his stacked turrets of spacers, washers and engine spares travel back through time to suggest archaeological accretions and geological strata.

[everythingatonce.com]

Part of Everything at Once

Presented by Lisson Gallery and The Vinyl Factory at the Store Studios, 180 The Strand

October-December 2017

Lisson Gallery opened on Bell Street in 1967, a year after John Cage’s pronouncement on the changing conditions of contemporary existence. In celebration of this anniversary, the gallery is partnering with The Vinyl Factory to stage ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’, an ambitious group exhibition inspired by these words, which could very well apply to our current anxiety-ridden age of ceaseless communication. Through new and historical works by 24 of the artists currently shown by Lisson Gallery (out of more than 150 to have had solo shows over the past 50 years), this extensive presentation aims to collapse half a century of artistic endeavour under one roof, while telescoping its original aims into an unknowable future.

As Cage predicted, we increasingly live in an all-at-once age, in which time and space are no longer rational or linear concepts and great distances can be traversed with an instantaneous click. More than ever before, contemporary art, like life, assaults us simultaneously from all angles and from anywhere on the globe, existing also as multisensory visions of an accelerated world.

In response, ‘EVERYTHING AT ONCE’ is neither a chronological exhibition nor an encyclopaedic history of the gallery’s activities since 1967, rather it is an interconnected journey incorporating 45 works exploring experience, effect and event, invoking immediacy and immutability. Ranging from text to installation, painting, sculpture, performance and sound, the selection presents some of Lisson’s leading artists, of both the past and present...

[Lisson Gallery]

Seal Harbor, Mount Desert - 1893

George Henry Smillie

1840 - 1921

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

Tropical Plant [recto] - c. 1930

Jane C. Stanley

American, 1863 - 1940

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

A comprehended God is no God.

— St John Chrysostom

Typeface: Roswell

Merchandise available: www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/141293487

One place, two photographs, separated by a handful of years. I so wanted to return with my new camera to recapture the idyllic stepping stone scene.

On my return to the spot, I found everything broken, laid waste. How could something so immutable as rock and mighty tree have been so quickly riven. For the few moments that I watched the stream, I was greatly saddened. I had been reminded that everything I treasure in life is evanescent, temporary, not here to stay.

Cherish the moments. Wondrous and beautiful things never endure.

In memory of Derek Pulfrey - the father of a good friend, who past away yesterday.

Real Estate = RE

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11 of 11

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Our mission is to horizontally and vertically unite real estate investment trusts (REITS) and real estate management and development companies on our NexGen Blockchain in order to DEMOCRATIZE the Information Technology Experience for your HUMAN IDENTITY.)

Real Estate = RE

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Blockchain Ecosystem = BE

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.

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

Three Landscapes - 1974

Saul Steinberg

American, born Romania, 1914 - 1999

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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 Waterfall - 1860s-1870s

John William Hill

American, 1812 - 1879

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

Rocks and Breaking Waves - c. 1870s

William Trost Richards

American, 1833 - 1905

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

South-West Point, Conanicut - 1878 / 1879

William Trost Richards

American, 1833 - 1905

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

Dale City, Virginia - 1978

Val Lewton

American, 1937 - 2015

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

South-West Point, Conanicut - 1878 / 1879

William Trost Richards

American, 1833 - 1905

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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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Harpers Ferry from Below - 1825-1827

Thomas Doughty

American, 1791 - 1856

___________________________________________

American Landscapes in Watercolor from the Corcoran Collection

August 2, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 22

Two centuries of watercolors capture the nation’s beauty from sea to shining sea.

In the nation’s early years, artists and explorers used watercolor for mapping and documenting the landscape. By the 19th century, American painters began capturing their country in larger, more finished works that were considered fine art.

See how artists with different backgrounds and styles painted iconic American places in watercolor over two centuries. You’ll travel from the Washington Monument to the choppy ocean waters of New England, from the Grand Canyon to Yosemite National Park, from the Hudson River Valley to local gardens.

American Landscapes features 30 works, most drawn from the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection.

www.nga.gov/exhibitions/american-landscapes-watercolor-co...

A new show of landscapes feels like a series of establishing shots. The characters, if any, are minor, deflecting attention. The focus, instead, is on scene setting, on the spiky needles of a pine, the blazing crimsons of dusk. The world here is still, waiting quietly, expectantly, for something to happen.

Staged in two small rooms, the 30 watercolors on show at the National Gallery of Art are dreamlike. Drawn from the Corcoran Collection and dating from the early 19th to the late 20th century, the pictures trace the history of the nation’s landscapes in watercolor, a medium long dismissed as sentimental or, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, work “better fitted for girls than for men.” It wasn’t until the establishment of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 and the work of Winslow Homer, William Trost Richards and others that the art form rocketed to new heights.

Particularly monumental is Richards’s view of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. “It has the feel of a grand oil painting,” says curator Amy Johnston. Mounted on its own wall in the show, the work swells with blue-green waves crashing against the jagged rock, the tide breaking in cobweb-white flourishes. Seagulls cut across the shadowed sky, like fingernails strewn about. An accomplished oil painter, Richards here revels in rich passages of teal, churning ravenously on textured brown paper. Like his contemporaries, he’s “trying to elevate the status of watercolor,” Johnston notes, imbuing it with a rare sublimity.

That splendor runs through the show. It comes through in the delicate pictures of Seth Eastman, a West Point cadet turned painter. His sketches, like one of the Hudson River from 1837, were dashed off out of doors, where he could linger on the deep greens shading into sage, the cascading hills of silvery blue-grays. Unlike oils, watercolors were affordable and lightweight, allowing for a kind of immediacy.

Consider William Russell Birch’s circa 1808 “View From the Springhouse at Echo,” an enigmatic sketch of a densely wooded forest, light filtering through a canopy of leaves, each tendril scrawled in black ink. There’s a harmony to the picture, a taupe ground tinged with gold, tree trunks striped with delicate crosshatches. It’s not so much a study of nature as a delight in it, the eye snaking between branches.

Homer took up the same theme in 1891. There, bands of ultramarine are broken by spindly logs of rich brown and cadmium white, the hills a wash of olive green, the two central figures nearly eclipsed in a sea of cascading sapphires. Homer left slivers of the paper exposed, never overextending himself. The result is impossibly deft: a moment in time seared, immutably, in memory.

By the 20th century, that sense of nostalgia sharpens, before giving way to bolder modernism. Dora Louise Murdoch’s “Parmelee Garden” drips with glossy pinks and lilacs, centering on the wistful grounds of the Northwest Washington estate designed by landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman. A lover of overgrown gardens, Shipman approached her work as if “painting pictures” with her plants, she said, “as an artist would.”

That artistry explodes with Alma Thomas’s circa 1960 “Winter Shadows.” Probably a view of a holly tree outside her 15th Street window in Washington, D.C., the work is a symphony of ultramarines and jades daubed with lavenders and blush pinks. Rhythm permeates the picture, rising and falling in time.

Many of these artists seem to be looking for something outside themselves.

️

Follow Art

Follow

Richards wandered along the shore of Narragansett Bay. He spent hours there studying the jutting edge of bluff, the thrill of the current. “I watch and try to disentangle its push and leap and recoil,” he told his friend, the art collector George Whitney, but “[I] am always startled out of my self-possession by the thunder and the rush.” He relished nature, surrendering to its pull. That practice, a kind of grace, informed his work. As he once advised his student Fidelia Bridges: “It is not so much what you accomplish as what you learn by the work. If it teaches you humility, patience and steadfastness, your life is well spent.”

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/17/american-lands...

________________________________

For earlier visit in 2024 see:

www.flickr.com/photos/ugardener/albums/72177720320689747/

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...

.

A comprehended God is no God.

— St John Chrysostom

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