Before Dawn

Life! Austere arbiter of each man's fate,

By whom he learns that Nature's steadfast laws

Are as decrees immutable; O pause

Your even forward march! Not yet too late

Teach me the needed lesson, when to wait

Inactive as a ship when no wind draws

To stretch the loosened cordage. One implores

Thy clemency, whose wilfulness innate

Has gone uncurbed and roughshod while the years

Have lengthened into decades; now distressed

He knows no rule by which to move or stay,

And teased with restlessness and desperate fears

He dares not watch in silence thy wise way

Bringing about results none could have guessed.

Amy Lowell

David Burns's Cottage and the Washington

Monument - 1892

Walter Paris

American, 1842 - 1906

___________________________________________

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...

.

What do we see? A proud young woman, with a cold gaze, is seated in the center of the painting. Objects are placed at his feet. Dressed simply, she holds a mysterious golden sphere in her hand. This portrait is actually a Vanity . Alfred Agache often represented this type of allegory in the guise of a young woman dressed in black. Here, the sphere represents the cycle of time, eternal and immutable.

But what about the other clues left by the artist to represent it? First of all, the pink shawl worn by the young woman could be a reference to her family, which made its fortune in textiles. It was following a trip through India, Egypt and Japan that Alfred Agache broke with his pre-determined destiny and turned definitively towards an artistic career. Speaking of Japan, did you notice the bamboo trees to the left of the canvas? And this book, bottom right… Could it be the one that his writer friend Auguste Angellier dedicated in his honor?

So many small details that may have helped him win the gold medal at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he had sent two of his paintings, including this one. Attached to his native land, he was appointed the following year general curator of the museums of Lille. Today, the museum keeps nine works by Alfred Agache, including seven canvases.

.

___________________________________________

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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View from the Springhouse at Echo - c. 1808

William Russell Birch

American, 1755 - 1834

___________________________________________

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 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...

.

Tides seem change during the day but the pattern is always the same.

Sou sempre, incondicionalmente, invariavelmente, imutavelmente, ISSO que não muda, que não vem, nem vai. [...] Assim, não há qualquer ilusão, qualquer sobreposição ao que É. Estou sempre aqui, em Paz, em Amor, em Liberdade, em Felicidade, porque ISSO é o que Sou. E Isso é o que você É. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Satsang com Mestre Gualberto; "Ao vivo"; 18 de dezembro de 2015, em Fortaleza/CE. ⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I am always, unconditionally, invariably immutably, THAT, which does not change, which does not come or go. [...] Thus, there is no illusion, no overlap to what IS. I am always here, in Peace, in Love, in Liberty, in Happiness, because THAT is what I AM. That is what You ARE. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Satsang with Master Gualberto; Live, Fortaleza, Brazil - december 18, 2015. ▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ #ramanashramgualberto #mestregualberto #satsang #ramana #ramanamaharshi #awakening #enlightenment #faith #faithful #god #grace #pray #amen #knowledge #inspirational #trust #peace #calm #mind #soul #wisdom #compassion #spiritual #thankful #meditation #life #meditate #guidance #noego #source

Seal Harbor, Mount Desert - 1893

George Henry Smillie

1840 - 1921

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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.

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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 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...

.

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 Lee Ufan

Composed of a raw stone facing a blank canvas and a wall painting bearing repeated, layered sweeps of paint, Lee’s two Dialogue works are displayed in a discrete, chamber-like environment. This silent, ascetic, but highly charged space encourages a close, personal encounter with the works and offers a place for contemplation.

[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]

Hm, it appears that the macro lens is stuck back on my camera. And that I am being compelled by some immutable force to take lots of flower shots. Must be spring.

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]

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.

️

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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...

.

By Anish Kapoor

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...

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]

By Anish Kapoor

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]

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...

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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...

.

DAFO projectes

By Anish Kapoor

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]

Ontario Sunset - 1988

Donald Holden

American, 1931 - 2017

___________________________________________

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 coming wave of containerization has pushed the principals of immutablity down to the application level. This has increased the velocity of deployment but also brought new and complex orchestration challenges.

.

___________________________________________

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...

.

DAFO projectes

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]

Parmelee Estate in Bloom - c. 1920

Dora Louise Murdoch

Artist, American, 1857 - 1933

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.”

___________________________________________

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.

️

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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...

.

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 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]

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]

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

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.”

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