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The Washington Family, 1789-1796
Edward Savage
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 62
This group portrait represents George Washington’s military, political, and family life. The president, in a Revolutionary War uniform, rests his hand on a plan for Washington, DC, the site for the new US capital. His wife, first lady Martha Washington, and her grandchildren join him at their Virginia plantation estate, Mount Vernon.
Research now suggests that the figure standing just outside the family group is Christopher Sheels, an enslaved attendant to the president. Unlike the four family members, Sheels is painted in shadow. Old damage to the paint makes it even harder to see his face clearly. Sheels’s presence signals that the president’s household depended on the labor of enslaved people, as did the economy of the young nation.
A light-skinned man, woman, boy, and girl, and a brown-skinned man sit and stand around a table spread with papers and a map in this horizontal portrait. The light-skinned man sits on a red upholstered chair at the table to our left, and his body faces our right in profile. His legs are crossed, and he rests his right elbow, closer to us, on the back of the chair. He has a sloping, rounded nose, dark eyes, jowls along his jawline, and his closed mouth juts forward. His left arm rests on an open pamphlet on the table next to a sword with a delicate silver hilt. To our left, the young boy stands also looks to our right in profile, next to the older man's chair. The boy wears a dusky rose-pink suit with a white lacy collar. With his right hand, he pulls back a dark green cloth covering a globe on a wooden stand along the left edge of the canvas. The woman sits at the right side of the table, across from the man. She has dark eyes, full cheeks, a double chin, and her pale lips are closed. She wears a voluminous ivory satin gown and petticoat with a black lace shawl, and an ivory cap with a satin bow covers her gray hair. She points to a spot on a map on the table with a closed fan held in her right hand. The young girl, wearing a gauzy white dress with a pine-green sash at the waist, stands on the far side of the table near the woman, holding the curling edges of the map. Behind the women, the brown-skinned man wears a rust-orange and gray uniform, and stands with one hand tucked into his vest in the shadows at the edge of the composition. His features are indistinct but he faces our left in profile. The room has a gold-and-yellow checkerboard floor, and a red cloth drapes from columns frame the scene to each side. It is unclear whether a river view at the back of the room is seen through an open window or door, or if it is a large painting behind the people.
Edward Savage's The Washington Family quickly became a veritable icon of our early national pride. In the winter of 1789–1790, President Washington and his wife posed for Savage in New York City, then the nation's capital. Mrs. Washington's grandchildren, taken in by the Washingtons after their father's death, probably also sat for their oil portraits in New York. Savage began to incorporate the separate life studies of their faces into a group portrait engraved on a copper plate. After a stay in England, he resumed the family portrait in Philadelphia—this time, however, in large format as an oil on canvas. The Washington Family was exhibited in 1796.
Savage's catalogue states that Washington's uniform and the papers beneath his hand allude to his "Military Character" and "Presidentship" respectively. With a map before her, Martha Washington is "pointing with her fan to the grand avenue," now known as Pennsylvania Avenue. An enslaved man dressed in livery and a supposed vista down the Potomac complete the imaginary scene.
Savage's self–taught ability to distinguish between satins, gauzes, and laces is nothing short of astonishing. However, the anatomy alternates between wooden and rubbery, and the family strangely avoids eye contact. Despite Savage's lack of experience, his huge Washington Family remains one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by a federal artist.
Edward Savage was a self-taught painter and engraver who became proprietor of a paintings gallery and natural history museum in Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Although his abilities improved, his talent never equaled his ambition. Born in 1761 in Princeton, Massachusetts, he painted commissioned copies of portraits by John Singleton Copley and a naively painted full-length portrait of Abraham Whipple (United States Naval Academy, Annapolis) in the mid-1780's before making portraits of George and Martha Washington in New York in 1789-1790. He went to London in 1791, where he published prints of his portraits of Henry Knox and Washington and had some contact with Benjamin West. He returned to Massachusetts in 1794, painted portraits, and married Sarah Seaver of Boston.
Savage went to Philadelphia in 1795, where from July he exhibited his panorama of London. The following February he opened the Columbian Gallery, "a large collection of ancient and modern Paintings and Prints." (Gazette of the United States, 20 February 1796). From then until 1801 he worked in Philadelphia as a painter, engraver, print publisher and gallery operator. Although his painting and engraving techniques had improved in England, he relied considerably on the assistance of his apprentice John Wesley Jarvis and English engraver David Edwin. Later they and others claimed that their talents added significantly to the quality of Savage's work in these years.
Savage exhibited his London panorama in New York in 1797 and moved there in 1801, where he reopened the Columbian Gallery. He is listed in New York city directories through 1810 as a "historical painter and museum proprietor". Gallery exhibits included his paintings of The Washington Family, Liberty, The Landing of Columbus ("from a picture in the collection of the Grand Duke of Tuscany") and his copy of West's Cupid Stung by a Bee. Engravings of "Liberty, Columbus, Etna, Vesuvius, a large whole length of Washington...and many other Prints published by E. Savage" were for sale. The museum offered natural history exhibits that were "arranged, agreeably to the ideas of Sir Hans Sloane, and with the addition of a number of paintings, and other interesting articles, will form a complete source of amusement for every class, particularly the amateurs of Arts and Sciences." (The Daily Advertiser 10 June 1802). Charles Bird King was a pupil in 1800-1805. In the winter of 1805-1806 he and Charles Willson Peale exchanged natural history specimens. The following summer he made a sketching trip to Niagara Falls.
Savage went briefly to Baltimore in 1810, where he advertised as a portrait painter in March (American, and Commercial Daily Advertiser, 19 March 1810). He moved that year to Boston, where he re-established the Columbian Museum on Tremont Street. He died seven years later, in 1817, on his farm in Princeton, Worcester County, Massachusetts. One of many talented artists of the Federal period, Savage is best remembered as one of the first proprietors of a museum and picture gallery. [This is an edited version of the artist's biography published in the NGA Systematic Catalogue]
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
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________________________________
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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La Diputación Permanente de la LVIII Legislatura local recibió iniciativas en materia política-electoral presentadas de manera diferenciada por el titular del Ejecutivo estatal y la diputada Adriana de Lourdes Hinojosa Céspedes, en nombre del Grupo Parlamentario del PAN, que tienen el propósito de expedir la legislación secundaria en esta materia, y que forman parte de la agenda del Décimo Periodo Extraordinario de Sesiones convocado para el próximo viernes 27 de este mes. goo.gl/6Ykgwb
Our partial or complete dentures in OKC can be a great solution for lost teeth. Smile, speak and even chew food comfortably again.
Joel Hernandez, Chair of the OAS Permanent Council and Permanent Representative of Mexico to the OAS
Date: December 7, 2012
Place: Washington, DC
Credit: Juan Manuel Herrera/OAS
Tiffany Chung, Born Da Nang, Viet Nam 1969
reconstructing an exodus history: boat trajectories from Vietnam and flight routes from refugee camps and of ODP cases, 2020, embroidery on fabric, overall: 55 in. × 137 3⁄4 in.
Delicate trails of scarlet thread embroidered across oceans of fabric represent the real-life journeys of refugees who fled Vietnam in the late twentieth century. Tiffany Chung compiled these routes to capture a perspective that had never been told: those of people like her family, who were forced to escape after the war ravaged their home country.
For Chung, the map is a way to frame her own experience. Having lived through the war and a subsequent move to the United States, she is fascinated by how political events change the world in ways big and small, shaping large-scale geographies as much as individual lives.
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"Women, queer artists, and artists of color have finally become the protagonists of recent American art history rather than its supporting characters. This is the lesson to be learned from the programming at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art since it reopened in 2015, and it is now the big takeaway in the nation’s capital, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, whose contemporary art galleries have reopened after a two-year closure.
During that time, architect Annabelle Selldorf refurbished these galleries, which have the challenge of pushing art history’s limits without going too far. Her interventions in these spaces are fairly inoffensive. Mainly, she’s pared down some of the structural clutter, removing some walls that once broke up a long, marble-floored hallway. To the naked eye, the galleries are only slightly different.
What is contained within, however, has shifted more noticeably—and is likely to influence other museums endeavoring to diversify their galleries. For one thing, I have never encountered a permanent collection hang with more Latinx and Native American artists, who, until very recently, were severely under-represented in US museums. That unto itself is notable.
It is a joy to see, presiding over one tall gallery, three gigantic beaded tunics courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw artist who will represent the US at the next Venice Biennale. Printed with bombastic patterning and hung on tipi poles, they hang over viewers’ heads and allude to the Ghost Shirts used by members of the Sioux to reach ancestral spirits. One says on it “WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING.” That statement can also be seen as a confession on behalf of SAAM’s curators to the artists now included in this rehang: a multiplicity of perspectives is more nourishing than having just one.
Something similar can be seen in Judith F. Baca’s Las Tres Marías (1976). The installation features a drawing of a shy-looking chola on one side and an image of Baca as a tough-as-nails Pachuca on the other. These are both Chicana personae—the former from the ’70s, the latter from the ’40s—and the third component, a long looking glass, sutures the viewer into the piece. It’s no surprise this piece is shaped like a folding mirror, an item used to examine how one may present to the outside world. Baca suggests that a single reflection isn’t enough. To truly understand one’s self, many are needed.
It is hardly as though the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection ever lacked diversity. Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (2002), a video installation featuring a map of the country with each state’s borders containing TV monitors, is a crown jewel of the collection. It has returned once more, where it now faces a 2020 Tiffany Chung piece showing a United States strung with thread. So, too, has Alma Thomas’s magnum opus, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976), a three-part stunner showing an array of petal-like red swatches drifting across white space.
But the usual heroes of 20th century art history are notably absent. Partly, that is because the Smithsonian American Art Museum doesn’t own notable works by canonical figures like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. (For those artists, you’d have to head to the National Gallery of Art.) Yet it is also partly because the curators want to destabilize the accepted lineage of postwar American art, shaking things up a bit and seeing where they land.
There is, of course, the expected Abstract Expressionism gallery, and while works by Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still are present, those two are made to share space with artists whose contributions are still being properly accounted for. The standouts here are a prismatic painting by Ojibwe artist George Morrison and a piquant hanging orb, formed from knotted steel wire, by Claire Falkenstein.
This being the nation’s capital, there is also an entire space devoted to the Washington Color School. Come for Morris Louis’s 20-foot-long Beta Upsilon (1960), on view for the first time in 30 years, now minus the pencil marks left on its vast white center by a troublemaking visitor a long time ago. Stay for Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Half Light (1964), a painting that features a circle divided into colored quadrants, one of which has two mysterious dots near one edge.
From there, the sense of chronology begins to blur. The Baca piece appears in a gallery that loosely takes stock of feminist art of the 1970s; a clear picture of the movement’s aims fails to emerge because the various artists’ goals appear so disparate. It’s followed by an even vaguer gallery whose stated focus is “Multiculturalism and Art” during the ’70s and ’80s. Beyond the fact that all five artists included are not white, the gallery doesn’t have much of a binding thesis.
This partial view of recent art history leads to gaps, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it offers due recognition for art-historical nonpareils. Audrey Flack is represented by Queen (1976), a Photorealist painting showing a view of a sliced orange, a rose, photographs, a playing card, and trinkets blown up to a towering size. It’s both gaudy and glorious. Hats off to the curators for letting it shine.
Then there are two totem-like sculptures by the late Truman Lowe, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, that are allowed to command a tall space of their own. They feature sticks of peeled willow that zigzag through boxy lumber structures, and they refuse to enjoin themselves to any artistic trend. Later on, there are three deliciously odd paintings by Howard Finster, of Talking Heads album cover fame. One shows Jesus descended to a mountain range strewn with people and cars who scale the peaks. Try cramming that into the confines of an accepted art movement.
That’s just three lesser-knowns who make an impact—there are many others on hand, from Ching Ho Cheng to Ken Ohara. And yet, herein lies this hang’s big problem: its gaping omissions in between them all, which are likely to be visible not just to the literati of the art world but to the general public, too.
Despite the focus of these new galleries being the 1940s to now, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and their resultant offshoots are skipped over entirely as the curators rush through the postwar era in order to get closer to the present. The Paik installation aside, there is almost no video art in this hang (although there is a newly formed space for moving-image work where a Carrie Mae Weems installation can be found), and no digital art or performance documentation at all, which is a shame, given that the museum owns important works by the likes of Cory Arcangel and Ana Mendieta, respectively. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s and its devastating impact on the art world isn’t mentioned a single time in the wall text for these new galleries, and queer art more broadly is a blind spot.
Protest art periodically makes the cut, but any invocation of racism, misogyny, colonialism, and the like is typically abstracted or aestheticized. That all makes a work like Frank Romero’s Death of Rubén Salazar (1986) stand out. The painting depicts the 1970 killing of a Los Angeles Times reporter in a café during an unrelated incident amid a Chicano-led protest against the high number of Latino deaths in the Vietnam War. With its vibrant explosions of tear gas (Salazar was killed when a tear gas canister shot by the LA Sheriff Department struck his head) and its intense brushwork, it is as direct as can be—a history painting for our times. So, too, in a much different way, is Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s Run, Jane, Run! (2004), a piece that ports over the “Immigrant Crossing” sign, first installed near the US-Mexico border in Southern California in the 1990s, and remakes it as a yellow tapestry that is threaded with barbed wire.
In general, this presentation could use more art like Romero and Jimenez Underwood’s. Yet the curators at least cop to the fact they’re seeking to hold handsome craftmanship and ugly historical events in tension, and the methods on display are productive in that regard.
By way of example, there’s Firelei Báez 2022 painting Untitled (Première Carte Pour L’Introduction A L’Histoire De Monde), which features a spray of red-orange paint blooming across a page from an 18th-century atlas documenting Europe’s colonies. One could say Báez’s blast of color recalls the bloodshed of manifest destiny, but that seems like an unfair interpretation for a work that provides so much visual pleasure. Rather than re-presenting the violence of a bygone era, Báez beautifies it. The result allows history to begin anew—on Báez’s own terms."
www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/smithsonian-american-art...
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Permanent resident. Burnt in the 2001 Bonny Hills bush fires; badly damaged claws prevent her from climbing large trees at a fast pace; wouldnt be able to escape danger.
I think this is the nicest picture of Bon I've taken :-)
Beijing (China), 26 de junio de 2025.- Previo a culminar su agenda en la República Popular China, el presidente Daniel Noboa mantuvo una reunión con Zhao Leji, presidente del Comité Permanente de la Asamblea Popular Nacional de China. Este encuentro impulsa la cooperación, el trabajo bilateral, fortaleciendo las relaciones de ambas naciones para afrontar los desafíos y dinamizar una economía mundial abierta.
Fotos: Isaac Castillo/Presidencia del Ecuador.
La Diputación Permanente convocó al Décimo Periodo Extraordinario de Sesiones de la LVIII Legislatura estatal a partir del viernes 27 de junio, con una agenda plural de iniciativas propuestas por los Grupos Parlamentarios del PRI, PRD, PAN, Nueva Alianza y PT, así como del titular del Ejecutivo estatal, en materia electoral, económica y comercial, patrimonio municipal, protección de víctimas del delito, seguridad pública, derechos humanos y cultura, entre otras. goo.gl/JfGkXa
On 12 December 2024, Permanent Representatives gathered at the ASEAN Headquarters/ASEAN Secretariat for the 12/2024 CPR Meeting, chaired by Ambassador Bovonethat Douangchak, Permanent Representative of Lao PDR to ASEAN. The CPR continued discussions on key initiatives of the CPR and reinforced ASEAN's collective efforts for the year ahead. This final CPR Meeting of the year preceded the CPR Chairmanship Handover Ceremony from Lao PDR to Malaysia.
Image Credit: ASEAN Secretariat / Kusuma Pandu Wijaya
Well at least it is since 1910. I'm going to be doing some more research into the meaning behind "Canada Permanent Building" as it really caught my "curiosity" factor. Right now the building is utilized by a Japanese restaurant.
Permanent Makeup rocking New World Brewery, Ybor City, Tampa, FL - December 25, 2014.
Note: Please share, download and use these photos for non-commercial purposes but be sure to abide by the creative commons license by crediting the photos to Nicole Kibert / www.elawgrrl.com and if using online, add a link back to this page or to www.elawgrrl.com. This license does not permit commercial use. Thanks.
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"Women, queer artists, and artists of color have finally become the protagonists of recent American art history rather than its supporting characters. This is the lesson to be learned from the programming at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art since it reopened in 2015, and it is now the big takeaway in the nation’s capital, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, whose contemporary art galleries have reopened after a two-year closure.
During that time, architect Annabelle Selldorf refurbished these galleries, which have the challenge of pushing art history’s limits without going too far. Her interventions in these spaces are fairly inoffensive. Mainly, she’s pared down some of the structural clutter, removing some walls that once broke up a long, marble-floored hallway. To the naked eye, the galleries are only slightly different.
What is contained within, however, has shifted more noticeably—and is likely to influence other museums endeavoring to diversify their galleries. For one thing, I have never encountered a permanent collection hang with more Latinx and Native American artists, who, until very recently, were severely under-represented in US museums. That unto itself is notable.
It is a joy to see, presiding over one tall gallery, three gigantic beaded tunics courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw artist who will represent the US at the next Venice Biennale. Printed with bombastic patterning and hung on tipi poles, they hang over viewers’ heads and allude to the Ghost Shirts used by members of the Sioux to reach ancestral spirits. One says on it “WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING.” That statement can also be seen as a confession on behalf of SAAM’s curators to the artists now included in this rehang: a multiplicity of perspectives is more nourishing than having just one.
Something similar can be seen in Judith F. Baca’s Las Tres Marías (1976). The installation features a drawing of a shy-looking chola on one side and an image of Baca as a tough-as-nails Pachuca on the other. These are both Chicana personae—the former from the ’70s, the latter from the ’40s—and the third component, a long looking glass, sutures the viewer into the piece. It’s no surprise this piece is shaped like a folding mirror, an item used to examine how one may present to the outside world. Baca suggests that a single reflection isn’t enough. To truly understand one’s self, many are needed.
It is hardly as though the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection ever lacked diversity. Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (2002), a video installation featuring a map of the country with each state’s borders containing TV monitors, is a crown jewel of the collection. It has returned once more, where it now faces a 2020 Tiffany Chung piece showing a United States strung with thread. So, too, has Alma Thomas’s magnum opus, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976), a three-part stunner showing an array of petal-like red swatches drifting across white space.
But the usual heroes of 20th century art history are notably absent. Partly, that is because the Smithsonian American Art Museum doesn’t own notable works by canonical figures like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. (For those artists, you’d have to head to the National Gallery of Art.) Yet it is also partly because the curators want to destabilize the accepted lineage of postwar American art, shaking things up a bit and seeing where they land.
There is, of course, the expected Abstract Expressionism gallery, and while works by Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still are present, those two are made to share space with artists whose contributions are still being properly accounted for. The standouts here are a prismatic painting by Ojibwe artist George Morrison and a piquant hanging orb, formed from knotted steel wire, by Claire Falkenstein.
This being the nation’s capital, there is also an entire space devoted to the Washington Color School. Come for Morris Louis’s 20-foot-long Beta Upsilon (1960), on view for the first time in 30 years, now minus the pencil marks left on its vast white center by a troublemaking visitor a long time ago. Stay for Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Half Light (1964), a painting that features a circle divided into colored quadrants, one of which has two mysterious dots near one edge.
From there, the sense of chronology begins to blur. The Baca piece appears in a gallery that loosely takes stock of feminist art of the 1970s; a clear picture of the movement’s aims fails to emerge because the various artists’ goals appear so disparate. It’s followed by an even vaguer gallery whose stated focus is “Multiculturalism and Art” during the ’70s and ’80s. Beyond the fact that all five artists included are not white, the gallery doesn’t have much of a binding thesis.
This partial view of recent art history leads to gaps, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it offers due recognition for art-historical nonpareils. Audrey Flack is represented by Queen (1976), a Photorealist painting showing a view of a sliced orange, a rose, photographs, a playing card, and trinkets blown up to a towering size. It’s both gaudy and glorious. Hats off to the curators for letting it shine.
Then there are two totem-like sculptures by the late Truman Lowe, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, that are allowed to command a tall space of their own. They feature sticks of peeled willow that zigzag through boxy lumber structures, and they refuse to enjoin themselves to any artistic trend. Later on, there are three deliciously odd paintings by Howard Finster, of Talking Heads album cover fame. One shows Jesus descended to a mountain range strewn with people and cars who scale the peaks. Try cramming that into the confines of an accepted art movement.
That’s just three lesser-knowns who make an impact—there are many others on hand, from Ching Ho Cheng to Ken Ohara. And yet, herein lies this hang’s big problem: its gaping omissions in between them all, which are likely to be visible not just to the literati of the art world but to the general public, too.
Despite the focus of these new galleries being the 1940s to now, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and their resultant offshoots are skipped over entirely as the curators rush through the postwar era in order to get closer to the present. The Paik installation aside, there is almost no video art in this hang (although there is a newly formed space for moving-image work where a Carrie Mae Weems installation can be found), and no digital art or performance documentation at all, which is a shame, given that the museum owns important works by the likes of Cory Arcangel and Ana Mendieta, respectively. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s and its devastating impact on the art world isn’t mentioned a single time in the wall text for these new galleries, and queer art more broadly is a blind spot.
Protest art periodically makes the cut, but any invocation of racism, misogyny, colonialism, and the like is typically abstracted or aestheticized. That all makes a work like Frank Romero’s Death of Rubén Salazar (1986) stand out. The painting depicts the 1970 killing of a Los Angeles Times reporter in a café during an unrelated incident amid a Chicano-led protest against the high number of Latino deaths in the Vietnam War. With its vibrant explosions of tear gas (Salazar was killed when a tear gas canister shot by the LA Sheriff Department struck his head) and its intense brushwork, it is as direct as can be—a history painting for our times. So, too, in a much different way, is Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s Run, Jane, Run! (2004), a piece that ports over the “Immigrant Crossing” sign, first installed near the US-Mexico border in Southern California in the 1990s, and remakes it as a yellow tapestry that is threaded with barbed wire.
In general, this presentation could use more art like Romero and Jimenez Underwood’s. Yet the curators at least cop to the fact they’re seeking to hold handsome craftmanship and ugly historical events in tension, and the methods on display are productive in that regard.
By way of example, there’s Firelei Báez 2022 painting Untitled (Première Carte Pour L’Introduction A L’Histoire De Monde), which features a spray of red-orange paint blooming across a page from an 18th-century atlas documenting Europe’s colonies. One could say Báez’s blast of color recalls the bloodshed of manifest destiny, but that seems like an unfair interpretation for a work that provides so much visual pleasure. Rather than re-presenting the violence of a bygone era, Báez beautifies it. The result allows history to begin anew—on Báez’s own terms."
www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/smithsonian-american-art...
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Jean Honoré Fragonard - French, 1732 - 1806
A Game of Hot Cockles, c. 1775/1780
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 55
Towering, pale, celery-green trees frame a view of a lush park with about a dozen elegantly dressed, light-skinned men and women in this vertical landscape painting. The color palette is dominated by moss and lemon-lime green, golden yellow, and spruce blue. The men all wear jackets with long tails over knee-breeches, and their long hair is pulled back at the napes of their necks. The women wear long dresses with full skirts and hints of lace at the sleeves and bust, and their brown or white hair is pulled up. Nine of the men and women gather to our right on a stone terrace along the bottom edge of the painting. A man in butter yellow kneels in front of a woman wearing rose pink. Around this pair, people stand, kneel, sit, or recline wearing aquamarine blue, light turquoise, or ivory white. A man and woman sit on a bench to our left, a little removed from the larger group. This woman wears ruby red and the man leaning toward her wears topaz blue. Two people in the park beyond these groups are painted with only a few strokes of pale blue and white paint, and they look over a low hedge row lining the walking path. Beds of red flowers fill the lower corners of the composition in front of a statue of a woman to our left and a person, perhaps on a fountain, to our right. The grassy walking path and trees become more blue as they fade into the hazy distance between the tall tress to either side. The sky fades from pale blue along the horizon to a silvery blue, almost white, at the top.
As with so many of Fragonard’s paintings, the original destination of A Game of Horse and Rider [FIG. 1] and A Game of Hot Cockles remains mysterious; the paintings made their first public appearance only in the late nineteenth century.[1] They were undoubtedly intended as pendants, however, and meant to be installed in boiseries as part of a larger decorative program. The paintings are equal in size and have similar color schemes and compositions, and their subjects are perfectly complementary; each focuses on richly verdant gardens in which groups of figures have gathered to enjoy games in the outdoors. In style and theme they can be compared to the larger canvases of Blindman's Buff [FIG. 2] and The Swing [FIG. 3], works that include similar figures that appear in the present paintings. For example, the dashing couple — the man in blue suit, the woman in red dress, their white lapdog beside them — seated on the bench to the left of the game in Hot Cockles seem to have wandered over from The Swing, where we see them lounging at the left, about to dip a similar white dog into the fountain. Despite the differences in size, the four garden paintings in the National Gallery of Art were very likely painted about the same time, probably between 1775 and 1780.
The similarities among the four paintings have often been noted, but whether they were intended as part of the same decorative scheme that also included another monumental garden scene, Fête at Saint-Cloud [FIG. 4], is still an open question.[2] The figures in Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles are more carefully finished and richly detailed than those in the larger garden scenes, perhaps a function of their better state of preser-vation, with the impasto of the brushwork and the delicate glazes applied to the figures still mostly intact. Nevertheless, the canvases are probably fragments, as Jean-Pierre Cuzin first suggested.[3] The branches and trunks of the towering trees are somewhat arbitrarily cropped at the top edge, and technical evidence suggests that the paintings have been cut down.[4] The two paintings may originally have been much taller, perhaps equal in height to Blindman’s Buff, The Swing, and Fête at Saint-Cloud (about 216 cm). The resulting compositions, while extremely tall and narrow, would not have been unusual for decorative painting, which often was conceived to fit into established wall paneling.[5] Many garden scenes by Hubert Robert (French, 1733 - 1808), for example, combine a soaring landscape and cloud-filled skies with groups of figures occupying themselves in the lower section of the painting [FIG. 5].[6]
The games of blindman’s buff and swinging have remained popular with children today, but horse and rider and hot cockles may be less familiar. Yet both were common in Fragonard’s time, and they appear with some frequency in works of art produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[7] Fragonard’s paintings marvelously evoke the spirit of both activities. In Horse and Rider (in French the game is called “le cheval fondu,” or melted horse), the players have divided into two teams, one acting as a multilegged “horse,” bracing itself against a tree; the second team consists of “riders” who run and leap, one by one, onto the back of the “horse.” Once they are all aboard, the horse team tries to shake them off. In Fragonard’s painting two of the riders already seem to be losing their grip as they anticipate the charge of a teammate. Hot cockles (“la main chaude” or “frappe main”), by contrast, is a less physical game in which sleight of hand and close attention are rewarded. One player, the “penitent,” hides his face in the lap of a second (called the “confessor,” a referee who monitors the game) and places his hand flat behind his back. In turn, the other players slap the penitent on the hand, and he tries to identify who hit him. The player who lets himself be discovered becomes the penitent. This moment apparently is captured in the painting, as we see the penitent gesturing toward the person he has identified (either the standing woman in the light blue dress or the recoiling young man behind her). Fragonard records with his usual prescience the expressions, gestures, and body language that convey a sense of their amusement and absorption in the game.
The genesis of Fragonard’s paintings is as mysterious as their original purpose. Although the landscapes and figures in Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles are among the artist’s most accomplished inventions, no preparatory studies for them exist.[8] As with much of his oeuvre, it is as if Fragonard created them directly on the canvas, with little of the preparation and planning that one usually expects in such elaborate productions. Yet he did not invent these scenes out of whole cloth, for there was an established tradition for representing games in landscape settings; Fragonard undoubtedly had access to this tradition, and the National Gallery’s paintings are clearly indebted to it. For example, Fragonard certainly was aware of the series of prints representing games published by Jacques Stella (French, 1596 - 1657) and Gabriel Perelle (French, 1603 - 1677) in the seventeenth century [FIG. 6].[9] But, as with the larger canvases showing Blindman’s Buff and The Swing, the present paintings owe a debt to Jean-Baptiste Oudry (French, 1686 - 1755), whose designs for a tapestry cycle on the theme of Amusements champêtres include representations of Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles that are closely related to Fragonard’s compositions [FIG. 7].[10] Despite their extraordinary inventiveness and incomparable technical mastery, these paintings continue a convention of decorative pastoral art that has its roots in the fête galante of the earlier eighteenth century.
As with Fragonard’s larger garden paintings, the possible meanings of these games have been a matter of debate among scholars. We may wonder whether Fragonard’s intention was to invest them with allegorical or emblematic meaning or whether he used them merely to enliven a pair of decorative landscapes. As Colin Eisler pointed out, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (?1525 / 1530 – 1569) included boys playing horse and rider in his painting Children’s Games, which has been interpreted as an evocation of the folly of youth.[11] In Fragonard’s painting the rowdy play of the boys is juxtaposed with the older couple at the left, who, it is perhaps implied, enjoy a more adult game of flirtation. This activity is expanded upon in Hot Cockles, in which the amusement — like the related one of blindman’s buff — is an obvious allegory of courtship.[12] This interpretation is emphasized by the sculptures included in the scene: at the right edge, surmounting a pedestal with a carved relief of dancing figures, is Étienne Maurice Falconet’s (1716 – 1791) Menacing Cupid, who holds a finger to his lips. This work, exhibited at the Salon of 1757, had already been used by Fragonard in his early version of The Swing (London, Wallace Collection); here it plays a similar role of commenting on the proceedings, for the success of the game of hot cockles depends on the participants remaining discreet. It is balanced on the left by a second sculpture, which Eisler understood to represent an altar to love, similar to the one depicted in Jean Baptiste Greuze’s painting The Offering to Love of about 1767.[13]
In conceiving A Game of Horse and Rider and A Game of Hot Cockles, Fragonard clearly meant for the viewer to measure one painting against the other, and he invested the landscape settings with a greater significance than is apparent in Oudry’s tapestry designs. Each picture depicts a corner of a vast parkland, with figures playing in the foreground and a view deep into the center distance. With typical sophistication and wit, Fragonard placed the two amusements in settings that comment on and amplify the activities. As with Blindman’s Buff, The Swing, and Fête at Saint-Cloud, Fragonard contrasts two different styles of garden design popular in the eighteenth century — the picturesque and the formal — and populates them with suitable figures enjoying activities proper for their nature.[14] In Hot Cockles the game is played by elegantly dressed young adults in a formal garden, with clipped hedges, smooth parterres, potted trees, and discreetly placed sculptures. In Horse and Rider, by contrast, the garden is natural, with no signs of human manipulation; its principal motif is a gnarled and twisted tree that acts to support the rowdy horseplay of the youths. Their roughhousing is appropriate to the rugged ground on which they play, so different from the well-maintained parterre on which the demure game of Hot Cockles is enjoyed. Fragonard created internal points of contrast as well. The craggy contour of the tree at the right in Horse and Rider is distinguished from the graceful stand of birches at the left, just as the carousing youths are opposed to the well-dressed couple reclining nonchalantly on the ground. In each painting there are half-glimpsed views into the further reaches of the garden, suggestive of hidden attractions and intriguing corners yet to explore. Garden paths lead off in several directions in each painting. Hot Cockles is dominated by a principal central path, on which two women have stopped to admire an unseen view off to the right. In Horse and Rider a large river or basin occupies the middle ground, and in the distance a gondola, unloading a group of promenaders, can just be discerned. The original extreme verticality of these two paintings, with their towering trees and monumental skies, would have visually complemented the emphatically horizontal formats of Fête at Saint-Cloud and, when taken together, Blindman’s Buff and The Swing, works that articulate the vast expanse of the landscape rather than the infinite heights of the sky.
This text was previously published in Philip Conisbee et al., French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (Washington, DC, 2009), 188–194.
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
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________________________________
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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Toledo, 9 de octubre. Primera reunión de la Comisión no Permanente de Estudio para alcanzar un Pacto contra la Despoblación en Castilla-La Mancha. FOTOS: Carmen Toldos.
Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1785-1787
Thomas Gainsborough
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 59
Elizabeth Linley was a successful singer in London before marrying playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Their union was not happy: Sheridan forbade her from performing professionally, and Linley lived mostly alone in the country. Meanwhile, Sheridan pursued his career — and affairs with other women — in the city.
Gainsborough’s painting of Linley reveals her emotional state. Her expression and the moody landscape behind her convey longing and sadness. Linley died at age 38, a few years after this work was finished.
A pale-skinned woman wearing a long, rose-pink gown sits amid a lush landscape in this vertical portrait painting. The woman’s body is angled to our left, but she turns her head to look at us with green eyes under dark brows. She has a long, straight nose, smooth, flushed cheeks, and her carnation-pink lips are closed. Her long, curly, ash-brown hair is loosely pulled back in an emerald-green ribbon, but tendrils floating around her face seem to lift as in a breeze. A ponytail or thick tendril drapes over her far shoulder, almost reaching her waist. The low neckline of her gown is wrapped with translucent, gold cloth, and the elbow-length sleeves are gauzy white. The gown has a pale pink bodice and long, full skirt. Ribbons the same green as the one in her hair wrap around her waist and around the elbow we can see. She crosses her ankles so delicate, high-heeled, charcoal-gray slippers peek out from the bottom hem of her skirt. She sits on a gray boulder, her hands folded in her lap as she holds the ends of her translucent scarf. A tall tree grows along the right edge of the composition to arc up and over with olive-green and harvest-gold leaves. Beyond the woman, the land dips down to our left back into a tree-filled valley. Swipes of slate blue in the distance could be mountains. A short distance from us, to our left, one tree with a narrow, pale green canopy grows up against the sky. Behind that tree, yellow sunlight breaks through light blue, lavender-purple, and silver clouds that fill the rest of the sky. Parts of the scene are loosely painted with swirling, fluttering strokes, especially in the woman’s costume and the trees around her.
Elizabeth Linley's beauty and exceptional soprano voice brought her professional success in concerts and festivals in Bath and London. After marrying Sheridan in 1773 she left her career to support and participate in her husband's activities as politician, playwright, and orator. Sheridan's work was immensely popular, and his witty plays, A School for Scandal and The Rivals, are a beloved part of today's theatrical repertoire.
Mrs. Sheridan is shown here at the age of thirty-one, a mature and elegant woman. Merged into the landscape, her gracious form bends to the curve of the trees behind her. Light plays as quickly and freely across her dress as it does across the clouds and the sky. The distinct textures of rocks, foliage, silk, and hair are unified by the strong, animated rhythms of Gainsborough's brush.
The freely painted, impressionistic style of Mrs. Sheridan's costume and the windblown landscape reflect the strong romantic component in Gainsborough's artistic temperament. However, his primary focus remains on his sitter's face and on her personality. Her chin and mouth are firm, definite, and sculptural, and her heavily drawn eyebrows give her a steady, composed, and dignified expression. There is a hint of romantic melancholy in her eyes, with their slightly indirect gaze.
More information on this painting can be found in the Gallery publication British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries, which is available as a free PDF.
Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, the youngest of the nine children of John Gainsborough and the sister of the Reverend Humphry Burroughs; he was baptized in Sudbury on 14 May 1727. He attended Sudbury Grammar School, of which his maternal uncle was the master. He took to sketching at an early age, and when he was thirteen prevailed upon his father to send him up to London to become an artist. A pupil of the French illustrator and draftsman Hubert Gravelot, Gainsborough was intimately involved with avant-garde rococo art and design, and seems to have assisted Francis Hayman on his genre paintings for the decoration of Vauxhall Gardens.
After a short period on his own in London between about 1744 and 1748, during which he painted small-scale portraits and landscapes in the manner of Jan Wijnants and Jacob van Ruisdael, and married Margaret Burr, Gainsborough returned to his native Suffolk. After a few years in Sudbury he moved, in 1752, to the larger seaport town of Ipswich. There is only one, uncorroborated, reference (to a visit to Flanders in later life) to suggest that he ever traveled abroad, as was customary among his fellow artists. By 1759, still finding it difficult to make ends meet and now with two daughters to support, he realized he had exhausted the possibilities of local patronage and moved to the fashionable spa town of Bath, where he achieved instantaneous success.
Set back by a nervous illness in 1763, he later became a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts, contributing to its first exhibition a scintillating female full-length portrait in the manner of Van Dyck. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Gainsborough customarily painted his portraits entirely with his own hand; his only known assistant was his nephew Gainsborough Dupont, who was apprenticed to him in 1772.
In 1774 Gainsborough moved to London, where he settled in a wing of Schomberg House, Pall Mall. In 1777 he received the first of many commissions from the royal family. In 1780 he exhibited a wide range of landscape compositions, and in 1783 made a tour of the Lake District in search of picturesque scenery. An original printmaker, he experimented in these years with soft-ground etching and aquatint; influenced by Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg's popular entertainment, the Eidophusikon, he also constructed a peep-show box in which transparencies were seen magnified and lit by candles from behind, producing a dramatic and colorful effect. After quarreling with the Royal Academy about the hanging of his pictures (he rarely participated in Academy affairs), from 1784 onward Gainsborough arra
________________________________
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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________________________________
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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La Comisión Permanente no Legislativa para las Políticas Integrales de la Discapacidad para la IX Legislatura se ha reunido con el siguiente orden del día:
1. Debate y votación de las solicitudes de comparecencia, presentadas por el Grupo Parlamentario Socialista, de las siguientes asociaciones y organismos, al objeto de que informen sobre sus actividades, propuestas y demandas:
- FEDERACIÓN CASTELLANO-MANCHEGA ASPACE.
- FEDERACIÓN SALUD MENTAL CASTILLA-LAMANCHA.
- FEDERACIÓN REGIONAL LUNA CASTILLA-LA-MANCHA.
- FESORMANCHA.
- ONCE.
- ADACE CLM.
- PLENA INCLUSIÓN CASTILLA-LA MANCHA.
- FASPAS CLM.
- ASPAYM CLM.
- FEDERACIÓN REGIONAL AUTISMO CASTILLA-LA MANCHA.
- FEDERACIÓN SINDROME DE DOWM CASTILLA-LA MANCHA.
- ENTIDADES ADHERIDAS ASEM CLM.
- FEACEM CLM.
- ENTIDADES COLABORADORAS COCEMFE.
- FACAM TDAH.
- FÓRUM DE LA DISCAPACIDAD DE CUENCA.
(Expediente 09/ACAP-00032).
2. Propuestas de los Grupos Parlamentarios, en su caso, sobre el calendario de dichas comparecencias.
La Comisiíon ha estado presidida por Emilio Sáez y han participado José Luis Escudero (PSOE), David Llorente (Podemos) y Cortes Valentín y Pilar Martínez (PP).
Martha Rosler
Born New York City 1943
from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, ca. 1967-1972, printed 2018, inkjet print, overall: 24 × 20 in.
House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home addresses the subject of gender as it confronts the effects of war and militarism. Collaged from advertising and photojournalistic images cut from newspapers and magazines, the artworks in this series juxtapose the "feminine" realm of domestic life with the "manly" business of waging war.
When Martha Rosler created these works, the US war in Vietnam was rapidly escalating. She observed that news images of the war often reinforced the impression that it was taking place "very far away, in a place we couldn't imagine." She crafted her photomontages to collapse the distance between home front and war front, essentially "bringing the war home." In the artist's words, "We are not 'here' and 'there.' We are all one, and that is crucial."
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"Women, queer artists, and artists of color have finally become the protagonists of recent American art history rather than its supporting characters. This is the lesson to be learned from the programming at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art since it reopened in 2015, and it is now the big takeaway in the nation’s capital, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, whose contemporary art galleries have reopened after a two-year closure.
During that time, architect Annabelle Selldorf refurbished these galleries, which have the challenge of pushing art history’s limits without going too far. Her interventions in these spaces are fairly inoffensive. Mainly, she’s pared down some of the structural clutter, removing some walls that once broke up a long, marble-floored hallway. To the naked eye, the galleries are only slightly different.
What is contained within, however, has shifted more noticeably—and is likely to influence other museums endeavoring to diversify their galleries. For one thing, I have never encountered a permanent collection hang with more Latinx and Native American artists, who, until very recently, were severely under-represented in US museums. That unto itself is notable.
It is a joy to see, presiding over one tall gallery, three gigantic beaded tunics courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw artist who will represent the US at the next Venice Biennale. Printed with bombastic patterning and hung on tipi poles, they hang over viewers’ heads and allude to the Ghost Shirts used by members of the Sioux to reach ancestral spirits. One says on it “WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING.” That statement can also be seen as a confession on behalf of SAAM’s curators to the artists now included in this rehang: a multiplicity of perspectives is more nourishing than having just one.
Something similar can be seen in Judith F. Baca’s Las Tres Marías (1976). The installation features a drawing of a shy-looking chola on one side and an image of Baca as a tough-as-nails Pachuca on the other. These are both Chicana personae—the former from the ’70s, the latter from the ’40s—and the third component, a long looking glass, sutures the viewer into the piece. It’s no surprise this piece is shaped like a folding mirror, an item used to examine how one may present to the outside world. Baca suggests that a single reflection isn’t enough. To truly understand one’s self, many are needed.
It is hardly as though the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection ever lacked diversity. Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (2002), a video installation featuring a map of the country with each state’s borders containing TV monitors, is a crown jewel of the collection. It has returned once more, where it now faces a 2020 Tiffany Chung piece showing a United States strung with thread. So, too, has Alma Thomas’s magnum opus, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976), a three-part stunner showing an array of petal-like red swatches drifting across white space.
But the usual heroes of 20th century art history are notably absent. Partly, that is because the Smithsonian American Art Museum doesn’t own notable works by canonical figures like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. (For those artists, you’d have to head to the National Gallery of Art.) Yet it is also partly because the curators want to destabilize the accepted lineage of postwar American art, shaking things up a bit and seeing where they land.
There is, of course, the expected Abstract Expressionism gallery, and while works by Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still are present, those two are made to share space with artists whose contributions are still being properly accounted for. The standouts here are a prismatic painting by Ojibwe artist George Morrison and a piquant hanging orb, formed from knotted steel wire, by Claire Falkenstein.
This being the nation’s capital, there is also an entire space devoted to the Washington Color School. Come for Morris Louis’s 20-foot-long Beta Upsilon (1960), on view for the first time in 30 years, now minus the pencil marks left on its vast white center by a troublemaking visitor a long time ago. Stay for Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Half Light (1964), a painting that features a circle divided into colored quadrants, one of which has two mysterious dots near one edge.
From there, the sense of chronology begins to blur. The Baca piece appears in a gallery that loosely takes stock of feminist art of the 1970s; a clear picture of the movement’s aims fails to emerge because the various artists’ goals appear so disparate. It’s followed by an even vaguer gallery whose stated focus is “Multiculturalism and Art” during the ’70s and ’80s. Beyond the fact that all five artists included are not white, the gallery doesn’t have much of a binding thesis.
This partial view of recent art history leads to gaps, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it offers due recognition for art-historical nonpareils. Audrey Flack is represented by Queen (1976), a Photorealist painting showing a view of a sliced orange, a rose, photographs, a playing card, and trinkets blown up to a towering size. It’s both gaudy and glorious. Hats off to the curators for letting it shine.
Then there are two totem-like sculptures by the late Truman Lowe, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, that are allowed to command a tall space of their own. They feature sticks of peeled willow that zigzag through boxy lumber structures, and they refuse to enjoin themselves to any artistic trend. Later on, there are three deliciously odd paintings by Howard Finster, of Talking Heads album cover fame. One shows Jesus descended to a mountain range strewn with people and cars who scale the peaks. Try cramming that into the confines of an accepted art movement.
That’s just three lesser-knowns who make an impact—there are many others on hand, from Ching Ho Cheng to Ken Ohara. And yet, herein lies this hang’s big problem: its gaping omissions in between them all, which are likely to be visible not just to the literati of the art world but to the general public, too.
Despite the focus of these new galleries being the 1940s to now, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and their resultant offshoots are skipped over entirely as the curators rush through the postwar era in order to get closer to the present. The Paik installation aside, there is almost no video art in this hang (although there is a newly formed space for moving-image work where a Carrie Mae Weems installation can be found), and no digital art or performance documentation at all, which is a shame, given that the museum owns important works by the likes of Cory Arcangel and Ana Mendieta, respectively. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s and its devastating impact on the art world isn’t mentioned a single time in the wall text for these new galleries, and queer art more broadly is a blind spot.
Protest art periodically makes the cut, but any invocation of racism, misogyny, colonialism, and the like is typically abstracted or aestheticized. That all makes a work like Frank Romero’s Death of Rubén Salazar (1986) stand out. The painting depicts the 1970 killing of a Los Angeles Times reporter in a café during an unrelated incident amid a Chicano-led protest against the high number of Latino deaths in the Vietnam War. With its vibrant explosions of tear gas (Salazar was killed when a tear gas canister shot by the LA Sheriff Department struck his head) and its intense brushwork, it is as direct as can be—a history painting for our times. So, too, in a much different way, is Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s Run, Jane, Run! (2004), a piece that ports over the “Immigrant Crossing” sign, first installed near the US-Mexico border in Southern California in the 1990s, and remakes it as a yellow tapestry that is threaded with barbed wire.
In general, this presentation could use more art like Romero and Jimenez Underwood’s. Yet the curators at least cop to the fact they’re seeking to hold handsome craftmanship and ugly historical events in tension, and the methods on display are productive in that regard.
By way of example, there’s Firelei Báez 2022 painting Untitled (Première Carte Pour L’Introduction A L’Histoire De Monde), which features a spray of red-orange paint blooming across a page from an 18th-century atlas documenting Europe’s colonies. One could say Báez’s blast of color recalls the bloodshed of manifest destiny, but that seems like an unfair interpretation for a work that provides so much visual pleasure. Rather than re-presenting the violence of a bygone era, Báez beautifies it. The result allows history to begin anew—on Báez’s own terms."
www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/smithsonian-american-art...
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Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1785-1787
Thomas Gainsborough
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 59
Elizabeth Linley was a successful singer in London before marrying playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Their union was not happy: Sheridan forbade her from performing professionally, and Linley lived mostly alone in the country. Meanwhile, Sheridan pursued his career — and affairs with other women — in the city.
Gainsborough’s painting of Linley reveals her emotional state. Her expression and the moody landscape behind her convey longing and sadness. Linley died at age 38, a few years after this work was finished.
A pale-skinned woman wearing a long, rose-pink gown sits amid a lush landscape in this vertical portrait painting. The woman’s body is angled to our left, but she turns her head to look at us with green eyes under dark brows. She has a long, straight nose, smooth, flushed cheeks, and her carnation-pink lips are closed. Her long, curly, ash-brown hair is loosely pulled back in an emerald-green ribbon, but tendrils floating around her face seem to lift as in a breeze. A ponytail or thick tendril drapes over her far shoulder, almost reaching her waist. The low neckline of her gown is wrapped with translucent, gold cloth, and the elbow-length sleeves are gauzy white. The gown has a pale pink bodice and long, full skirt. Ribbons the same green as the one in her hair wrap around her waist and around the elbow we can see. She crosses her ankles so delicate, high-heeled, charcoal-gray slippers peek out from the bottom hem of her skirt. She sits on a gray boulder, her hands folded in her lap as she holds the ends of her translucent scarf. A tall tree grows along the right edge of the composition to arc up and over with olive-green and harvest-gold leaves. Beyond the woman, the land dips down to our left back into a tree-filled valley. Swipes of slate blue in the distance could be mountains. A short distance from us, to our left, one tree with a narrow, pale green canopy grows up against the sky. Behind that tree, yellow sunlight breaks through light blue, lavender-purple, and silver clouds that fill the rest of the sky. Parts of the scene are loosely painted with swirling, fluttering strokes, especially in the woman’s costume and the trees around her.
Elizabeth Linley's beauty and exceptional soprano voice brought her professional success in concerts and festivals in Bath and London. After marrying Sheridan in 1773 she left her career to support and participate in her husband's activities as politician, playwright, and orator. Sheridan's work was immensely popular, and his witty plays, A School for Scandal and The Rivals, are a beloved part of today's theatrical repertoire.
Mrs. Sheridan is shown here at the age of thirty-one, a mature and elegant woman. Merged into the landscape, her gracious form bends to the curve of the trees behind her. Light plays as quickly and freely across her dress as it does across the clouds and the sky. The distinct textures of rocks, foliage, silk, and hair are unified by the strong, animated rhythms of Gainsborough's brush.
The freely painted, impressionistic style of Mrs. Sheridan's costume and the windblown landscape reflect the strong romantic component in Gainsborough's artistic temperament. However, his primary focus remains on his sitter's face and on her personality. Her chin and mouth are firm, definite, and sculptural, and her heavily drawn eyebrows give her a steady, composed, and dignified expression. There is a hint of romantic melancholy in her eyes, with their slightly indirect gaze.
More information on this painting can be found in the Gallery publication British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries, which is available as a free PDF.
Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, the youngest of the nine children of John Gainsborough and the sister of the Reverend Humphry Burroughs; he was baptized in Sudbury on 14 May 1727. He attended Sudbury Grammar School, of which his maternal uncle was the master. He took to sketching at an early age, and when he was thirteen prevailed upon his father to send him up to London to become an artist. A pupil of the French illustrator and draftsman Hubert Gravelot, Gainsborough was intimately involved with avant-garde rococo art and design, and seems to have assisted Francis Hayman on his genre paintings for the decoration of Vauxhall Gardens.
After a short period on his own in London between about 1744 and 1748, during which he painted small-scale portraits and landscapes in the manner of Jan Wijnants and Jacob van Ruisdael, and married Margaret Burr, Gainsborough returned to his native Suffolk. After a few years in Sudbury he moved, in 1752, to the larger seaport town of Ipswich. There is only one, uncorroborated, reference (to a visit to Flanders in later life) to suggest that he ever traveled abroad, as was customary among his fellow artists. By 1759, still finding it difficult to make ends meet and now with two daughters to support, he realized he had exhausted the possibilities of local patronage and moved to the fashionable spa town of Bath, where he achieved instantaneous success.
Set back by a nervous illness in 1763, he later became a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts, contributing to its first exhibition a scintillating female full-length portrait in the manner of Van Dyck. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Gainsborough customarily painted his portraits entirely with his own hand; his only known assistant was his nephew Gainsborough Dupont, who was apprenticed to him in 1772.
In 1774 Gainsborough moved to London, where he settled in a wing of Schomberg House, Pall Mall. In 1777 he received the first of many commissions from the royal family. In 1780 he exhibited a wide range of landscape compositions, and in 1783 made a tour of the Lake District in search of picturesque scenery. An original printmaker, he experimented in these years with soft-ground etching and aquatint; influenced by Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg's popular entertainment, the Eidophusikon, he also constructed a peep-show box in which transparencies were seen magnified and lit by candles from behind, producing a dramatic and colorful effect. After quarreling with the Royal Academy about the hanging of his pictures (he rarely participated in Academy affairs), from 1784 onward Gainsborough arra
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
..
________________________________
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...
.
Jean Honoré Fragonard - French, 1732 - 1806
A Game of Hot Cockles, c. 1775/1780
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 55
Towering, pale, celery-green trees frame a view of a lush park with about a dozen elegantly dressed, light-skinned men and women in this vertical landscape painting. The color palette is dominated by moss and lemon-lime green, golden yellow, and spruce blue. The men all wear jackets with long tails over knee-breeches, and their long hair is pulled back at the napes of their necks. The women wear long dresses with full skirts and hints of lace at the sleeves and bust, and their brown or white hair is pulled up. Nine of the men and women gather to our right on a stone terrace along the bottom edge of the painting. A man in butter yellow kneels in front of a woman wearing rose pink. Around this pair, people stand, kneel, sit, or recline wearing aquamarine blue, light turquoise, or ivory white. A man and woman sit on a bench to our left, a little removed from the larger group. This woman wears ruby red and the man leaning toward her wears topaz blue. Two people in the park beyond these groups are painted with only a few strokes of pale blue and white paint, and they look over a low hedge row lining the walking path. Beds of red flowers fill the lower corners of the composition in front of a statue of a woman to our left and a person, perhaps on a fountain, to our right. The grassy walking path and trees become more blue as they fade into the hazy distance between the tall tress to either side. The sky fades from pale blue along the horizon to a silvery blue, almost white, at the top.
As with so many of Fragonard’s paintings, the original destination of A Game of Horse and Rider [FIG. 1] and A Game of Hot Cockles remains mysterious; the paintings made their first public appearance only in the late nineteenth century.[1] They were undoubtedly intended as pendants, however, and meant to be installed in boiseries as part of a larger decorative program. The paintings are equal in size and have similar color schemes and compositions, and their subjects are perfectly complementary; each focuses on richly verdant gardens in which groups of figures have gathered to enjoy games in the outdoors. In style and theme they can be compared to the larger canvases of Blindman's Buff [FIG. 2] and The Swing [FIG. 3], works that include similar figures that appear in the present paintings. For example, the dashing couple — the man in blue suit, the woman in red dress, their white lapdog beside them — seated on the bench to the left of the game in Hot Cockles seem to have wandered over from The Swing, where we see them lounging at the left, about to dip a similar white dog into the fountain. Despite the differences in size, the four garden paintings in the National Gallery of Art were very likely painted about the same time, probably between 1775 and 1780.
The similarities among the four paintings have often been noted, but whether they were intended as part of the same decorative scheme that also included another monumental garden scene, Fête at Saint-Cloud [FIG. 4], is still an open question.[2] The figures in Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles are more carefully finished and richly detailed than those in the larger garden scenes, perhaps a function of their better state of preser-vation, with the impasto of the brushwork and the delicate glazes applied to the figures still mostly intact. Nevertheless, the canvases are probably fragments, as Jean-Pierre Cuzin first suggested.[3] The branches and trunks of the towering trees are somewhat arbitrarily cropped at the top edge, and technical evidence suggests that the paintings have been cut down.[4] The two paintings may originally have been much taller, perhaps equal in height to Blindman’s Buff, The Swing, and Fête at Saint-Cloud (about 216 cm). The resulting compositions, while extremely tall and narrow, would not have been unusual for decorative painting, which often was conceived to fit into established wall paneling.[5] Many garden scenes by Hubert Robert (French, 1733 - 1808), for example, combine a soaring landscape and cloud-filled skies with groups of figures occupying themselves in the lower section of the painting [FIG. 5].[6]
The games of blindman’s buff and swinging have remained popular with children today, but horse and rider and hot cockles may be less familiar. Yet both were common in Fragonard’s time, and they appear with some frequency in works of art produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[7] Fragonard’s paintings marvelously evoke the spirit of both activities. In Horse and Rider (in French the game is called “le cheval fondu,” or melted horse), the players have divided into two teams, one acting as a multilegged “horse,” bracing itself against a tree; the second team consists of “riders” who run and leap, one by one, onto the back of the “horse.” Once they are all aboard, the horse team tries to shake them off. In Fragonard’s painting two of the riders already seem to be losing their grip as they anticipate the charge of a teammate. Hot cockles (“la main chaude” or “frappe main”), by contrast, is a less physical game in which sleight of hand and close attention are rewarded. One player, the “penitent,” hides his face in the lap of a second (called the “confessor,” a referee who monitors the game) and places his hand flat behind his back. In turn, the other players slap the penitent on the hand, and he tries to identify who hit him. The player who lets himself be discovered becomes the penitent. This moment apparently is captured in the painting, as we see the penitent gesturing toward the person he has identified (either the standing woman in the light blue dress or the recoiling young man behind her). Fragonard records with his usual prescience the expressions, gestures, and body language that convey a sense of their amusement and absorption in the game.
The genesis of Fragonard’s paintings is as mysterious as their original purpose. Although the landscapes and figures in Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles are among the artist’s most accomplished inventions, no preparatory studies for them exist.[8] As with much of his oeuvre, it is as if Fragonard created them directly on the canvas, with little of the preparation and planning that one usually expects in such elaborate productions. Yet he did not invent these scenes out of whole cloth, for there was an established tradition for representing games in landscape settings; Fragonard undoubtedly had access to this tradition, and the National Gallery’s paintings are clearly indebted to it. For example, Fragonard certainly was aware of the series of prints representing games published by Jacques Stella (French, 1596 - 1657) and Gabriel Perelle (French, 1603 - 1677) in the seventeenth century [FIG. 6].[9] But, as with the larger canvases showing Blindman’s Buff and The Swing, the present paintings owe a debt to Jean-Baptiste Oudry (French, 1686 - 1755), whose designs for a tapestry cycle on the theme of Amusements champêtres include representations of Horse and Rider and Hot Cockles that are closely related to Fragonard’s compositions [FIG. 7].[10] Despite their extraordinary inventiveness and incomparable technical mastery, these paintings continue a convention of decorative pastoral art that has its roots in the fête galante of the earlier eighteenth century.
As with Fragonard’s larger garden paintings, the possible meanings of these games have been a matter of debate among scholars. We may wonder whether Fragonard’s intention was to invest them with allegorical or emblematic meaning or whether he used them merely to enliven a pair of decorative landscapes. As Colin Eisler pointed out, Pieter Brueghel the Elder (?1525 / 1530 – 1569) included boys playing horse and rider in his painting Children’s Games, which has been interpreted as an evocation of the folly of youth.[11] In Fragonard’s painting the rowdy play of the boys is juxtaposed with the older couple at the left, who, it is perhaps implied, enjoy a more adult game of flirtation. This activity is expanded upon in Hot Cockles, in which the amusement — like the related one of blindman’s buff — is an obvious allegory of courtship.[12] This interpretation is emphasized by the sculptures included in the scene: at the right edge, surmounting a pedestal with a carved relief of dancing figures, is Étienne Maurice Falconet’s (1716 – 1791) Menacing Cupid, who holds a finger to his lips. This work, exhibited at the Salon of 1757, had already been used by Fragonard in his early version of The Swing (London, Wallace Collection); here it plays a similar role of commenting on the proceedings, for the success of the game of hot cockles depends on the participants remaining discreet. It is balanced on the left by a second sculpture, which Eisler understood to represent an altar to love, similar to the one depicted in Jean Baptiste Greuze’s painting The Offering to Love of about 1767.[13]
In conceiving A Game of Horse and Rider and A Game of Hot Cockles, Fragonard clearly meant for the viewer to measure one painting against the other, and he invested the landscape settings with a greater significance than is apparent in Oudry’s tapestry designs. Each picture depicts a corner of a vast parkland, with figures playing in the foreground and a view deep into the center distance. With typical sophistication and wit, Fragonard placed the two amusements in settings that comment on and amplify the activities. As with Blindman’s Buff, The Swing, and Fête at Saint-Cloud, Fragonard contrasts two different styles of garden design popular in the eighteenth century — the picturesque and the formal — and populates them with suitable figures enjoying activities proper for their nature.[14] In Hot Cockles the game is played by elegantly dressed young adults in a formal garden, with clipped hedges, smooth parterres, potted trees, and discreetly placed sculptures. In Horse and Rider, by contrast, the garden is natural, with no signs of human manipulation; its principal motif is a gnarled and twisted tree that acts to support the rowdy horseplay of the youths. Their roughhousing is appropriate to the rugged ground on which they play, so different from the well-maintained parterre on which the demure game of Hot Cockles is enjoyed. Fragonard created internal points of contrast as well. The craggy contour of the tree at the right in Horse and Rider is distinguished from the graceful stand of birches at the left, just as the carousing youths are opposed to the well-dressed couple reclining nonchalantly on the ground. In each painting there are half-glimpsed views into the further reaches of the garden, suggestive of hidden attractions and intriguing corners yet to explore. Garden paths lead off in several directions in each painting. Hot Cockles is dominated by a principal central path, on which two women have stopped to admire an unseen view off to the right. In Horse and Rider a large river or basin occupies the middle ground, and in the distance a gondola, unloading a group of promenaders, can just be discerned. The original extreme verticality of these two paintings, with their towering trees and monumental skies, would have visually complemented the emphatically horizontal formats of Fête at Saint-Cloud and, when taken together, Blindman’s Buff and The Swing, works that articulate the vast expanse of the landscape rather than the infinite heights of the sky.
This text was previously published in Philip Conisbee et al., French Paintings of the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Century, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (Washington, DC, 2009), 188–194.
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
..
________________________________
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...
.
Pathway Home participants celebrate a Thanksgiving meal at their new home after signing a master lease for permanent supportive housing on November 21, 2023. (Mayra Beltran Vasquez/ Los Angeles County)
On August 22-24, LA County conducted its second Pathway Home encampment resolution (the first to focus on RVs) in the unincorporated area of East Gardena bordering West Rancho Dominguez, which has one of the densest concentrations of RVs countywide. The operation brought 58 people into interim housing, a hotel operated by our contracted service provider, SJC. It also took 30 RVs off the streets.
At the hotel, LA County offers them supportive services such as on-site case management and connections to physical and mental healthcare, substance use disorder treatment, benefits enrollment, life skills development, and more. LA County has committed to continue providing supportive services even after they move into permanent housing.
On Nov. 20-21 – just days before Thanksgiving – 20 Pathway Home clients will move into permanent housing at 1619 Firestone Ave. in unincorporated South LA. The apartments are brand new, prefab modular construction.
LAHSA is master leasing the site with funding from LA County’s partnership with the largest local managed care plans, L.A. Care and Health Net, called the Housing and Homelessness Incentive Program (HHIP).
Théodore Gericault - French, 1791 - 1824
Nude Warrior with a Spear, c. 1816
West Building, Ground Floor — Gallery G7
A nude, muscular, pale-skinned man sits on a rock in front of a deep, shadowy landscape in this vertical painting. Most of the man’s body is silhouetted against the sky, and he nearly fills the picture. His body faces our right almost in profile, and he turns his head to look away. He has short black hair and a moustache and beard. The rest of his face is in shadow. He rests his left arm, farther from us, along a spear that spans the composition from the lower right corner to the upper left. He grips the spear with the other hand. One knee is bent so his foot is propped on the stone just below his seat. The other leg, closer to us, stretches long. He sits on a pine-green cloth draped over the rock. Bands of brown and then blue rocky hills line the horizon, which comes a quarter of the way up this composition. Steel-gray and white clouds fill the sky above.
At the age of nineteen, Théodore Gericault entered the Parisian studio of Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a successful follower of Jacques-Louis David. In Guérin's studio the young Gericault would have refined his skills by drawing from antique statues and casts in the Louvre and then after the live model as a preliminary to full-scale works.
The Nude Warrior with a Spear is a bold presentation of the male nude that to Gericault's contemporaries would have recalled an "académie," or sketch that was executed as an exercise and meant to serve as inspiration for later, more finished, compositions. In this work however, Gericault has transformed his exercise into a finished easel painting. The model's right leg, spear, and left arm constitute three parallel diagonals, and the body itself is divided into a series of interlocked triangles as can be seen in the bent right arm and left thigh. The power of the figure, however, is communicated through the head, averted from the viewer, and gazing into a barren landscape. The contrast of the figure's virile form against the empty landscape can be understood as a romantic metaphor for the defeat of France, whose vast energies were funneled into the world of the imagination following the Napoleonic wars.
More information on this painting can be found in the Gallery publication French Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I: Before Impressionism, which is available as a free PDF
________________________________
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...
.
Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1785-1787
Thomas Gainsborough
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 59
Elizabeth Linley was a successful singer in London before marrying playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Their union was not happy: Sheridan forbade her from performing professionally, and Linley lived mostly alone in the country. Meanwhile, Sheridan pursued his career — and affairs with other women — in the city.
Gainsborough’s painting of Linley reveals her emotional state. Her expression and the moody landscape behind her convey longing and sadness. Linley died at age 38, a few years after this work was finished.
A pale-skinned woman wearing a long, rose-pink gown sits amid a lush landscape in this vertical portrait painting. The woman’s body is angled to our left, but she turns her head to look at us with green eyes under dark brows. She has a long, straight nose, smooth, flushed cheeks, and her carnation-pink lips are closed. Her long, curly, ash-brown hair is loosely pulled back in an emerald-green ribbon, but tendrils floating around her face seem to lift as in a breeze. A ponytail or thick tendril drapes over her far shoulder, almost reaching her waist. The low neckline of her gown is wrapped with translucent, gold cloth, and the elbow-length sleeves are gauzy white. The gown has a pale pink bodice and long, full skirt. Ribbons the same green as the one in her hair wrap around her waist and around the elbow we can see. She crosses her ankles so delicate, high-heeled, charcoal-gray slippers peek out from the bottom hem of her skirt. She sits on a gray boulder, her hands folded in her lap as she holds the ends of her translucent scarf. A tall tree grows along the right edge of the composition to arc up and over with olive-green and harvest-gold leaves. Beyond the woman, the land dips down to our left back into a tree-filled valley. Swipes of slate blue in the distance could be mountains. A short distance from us, to our left, one tree with a narrow, pale green canopy grows up against the sky. Behind that tree, yellow sunlight breaks through light blue, lavender-purple, and silver clouds that fill the rest of the sky. Parts of the scene are loosely painted with swirling, fluttering strokes, especially in the woman’s costume and the trees around her.
Elizabeth Linley's beauty and exceptional soprano voice brought her professional success in concerts and festivals in Bath and London. After marrying Sheridan in 1773 she left her career to support and participate in her husband's activities as politician, playwright, and orator. Sheridan's work was immensely popular, and his witty plays, A School for Scandal and The Rivals, are a beloved part of today's theatrical repertoire.
Mrs. Sheridan is shown here at the age of thirty-one, a mature and elegant woman. Merged into the landscape, her gracious form bends to the curve of the trees behind her. Light plays as quickly and freely across her dress as it does across the clouds and the sky. The distinct textures of rocks, foliage, silk, and hair are unified by the strong, animated rhythms of Gainsborough's brush.
The freely painted, impressionistic style of Mrs. Sheridan's costume and the windblown landscape reflect the strong romantic component in Gainsborough's artistic temperament. However, his primary focus remains on his sitter's face and on her personality. Her chin and mouth are firm, definite, and sculptural, and her heavily drawn eyebrows give her a steady, composed, and dignified expression. There is a hint of romantic melancholy in her eyes, with their slightly indirect gaze.
More information on this painting can be found in the Gallery publication British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries, which is available as a free PDF.
Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, the youngest of the nine children of John Gainsborough and the sister of the Reverend Humphry Burroughs; he was baptized in Sudbury on 14 May 1727. He attended Sudbury Grammar School, of which his maternal uncle was the master. He took to sketching at an early age, and when he was thirteen prevailed upon his father to send him up to London to become an artist. A pupil of the French illustrator and draftsman Hubert Gravelot, Gainsborough was intimately involved with avant-garde rococo art and design, and seems to have assisted Francis Hayman on his genre paintings for the decoration of Vauxhall Gardens.
After a short period on his own in London between about 1744 and 1748, during which he painted small-scale portraits and landscapes in the manner of Jan Wijnants and Jacob van Ruisdael, and married Margaret Burr, Gainsborough returned to his native Suffolk. After a few years in Sudbury he moved, in 1752, to the larger seaport town of Ipswich. There is only one, uncorroborated, reference (to a visit to Flanders in later life) to suggest that he ever traveled abroad, as was customary among his fellow artists. By 1759, still finding it difficult to make ends meet and now with two daughters to support, he realized he had exhausted the possibilities of local patronage and moved to the fashionable spa town of Bath, where he achieved instantaneous success.
Set back by a nervous illness in 1763, he later became a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts, contributing to its first exhibition a scintillating female full-length portrait in the manner of Van Dyck. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Gainsborough customarily painted his portraits entirely with his own hand; his only known assistant was his nephew Gainsborough Dupont, who was apprenticed to him in 1772.
In 1774 Gainsborough moved to London, where he settled in a wing of Schomberg House, Pall Mall. In 1777 he received the first of many commissions from the royal family. In 1780 he exhibited a wide range of landscape compositions, and in 1783 made a tour of the Lake District in search of picturesque scenery. An original printmaker, he experimented in these years with soft-ground etching and aquatint; influenced by Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg's popular entertainment, the Eidophusikon, he also constructed a peep-show box in which transparencies were seen magnified and lit by candles from behind, producing a dramatic and colorful effect. After quarreling with the Royal Academy about the hanging of his pictures (he rarely participated in Academy affairs), from 1784 onward Gainsborough arra
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
..
________________________________
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...
.
Subcomissão Permanente da Pessoa com Deficiência (CASPCD) e a Subcomissão Temporária sobre Doenças Raras (CASDRAR) realizam audiência pública interativa para debater questões relacionadas à Síndrome de Tourette.
À mesa, em pronunciamento, presidente da Associação Solidária do TOC e Síndrome de Tourette, Larissa Miranda.
Foto: Jane de Araújo/Agência Senado
14-21 November, 2013. Pamela Branas, Micheal Graham, Sophie Hague, Sharon Kitching, Lena Obergfell, Cathy Weiszmann
Dining Room
10:15 p.m.
Note: When we were seated out at our table at 8:45 p.m., the room was fully occupied.
Covina
127 East 27th Street
New York, NY
Marlene Da Vargem DA SILVA, Alternate Representative of Venezuela to the OAS
Date: February 22, 2013
Place: Washington, DC
Credit: Maria Patricia Leiva/OAS
I WEBINÁRIO DA COMISSÃO PERMANENTE DE POLÍTICAS SOCIAIS E DE DESENVOLVIMENTO DO CIDADÃO.
Juíza auxiliar da presidência do CNJ, Dayse Starling Motta.
Foto: Gil Ferreira/Agência CNJ
The Return, 1837
Thomas Cole
West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 71
Thomas Cole turns the landscape into a backdrop for a medieval tale in The Return, one of a pair of luminous paintings set at sunrise and sunset. Cole drew on several sources, including Scottish historian and poet Sir Walter Scott’s popular verses about warfare between the English and the Scots. The Middle Ages fascinated Americans of the day, inspiring works of literature, architecture, and art.
Honey-gold sunlight from low along the horizon to our left falls across the copper and bronze-colored canopies of trees that frame our view of a stone church with stained glass windows and ornate spires in this horizontal landscape painting. We look down onto the scene from a height, and from a distance. On a dirt path across the front of the picture, an armored man is carried on a red cloth-draped stretcher, which is supported over the shoulders of four men. The armored man has a black beard and hair, and his face is turned from us. The men carrying him wear togas in white, rose pink, slate blue, and mustard yellow. Three of them wear armored breastplates and helmets. A white horse draped with a gold, lattice-like blanket walks behind them. An empty saddle is strapped to its back, and the reigns rest around its neck behind the lowered head. A bit behind this grouping, to our left, another armored man holding a spear rides a brown horse, and, farther back along the path, a man holding a crooked staff and a woman stand near the base of a tall, narrow plinth. The plinth is backlit so ornate carving along the roof-like top creates a spiky silhouette. A sculpted person stands at the peak of the roof, a halo around the head. The area beyond the plinth is layered with trees and bushes extending into the distance, lit sage green by the setting sun. The path with the horses and men runs parallel to a ravine, so the grassy embankment closer to us is in deep shadow. At least two brown goats walk along in the shadows of the ravine near the white horse. Four more white goats, one with black spots, stand and lie near a tree that rises nearly the height of the painting along the right edge. The tree has rust-red leaves, and the trunk leans away from us, to our right. One massive branch has been shorn off, and the exposed wood is caramel brown against the darker, gnarled trunk. The church is beyond the path, to our right of center. Tall stained-glass windows, several stories high, are ablaze in red, orange, and topaz blue. Birds, painted with short strokes of black, flock around the church roofline. A procession led by a man wearing blue and red vestments and a tall, split cap emerges from the main, arched doorway. Another man wearing a brown robe stands near a sun dial between us and the procession coming from the church. The wide brim of that man’s hat is fastened at the front with a gold object. He lifts one hand and holds a long staff with a black knob at its center with his other. More people walk near the church, sit on a bench under a tree, and move through the landscape deep into the distance. All the people have light skin. Beyond the moss-green, grassy area around the path and church, a river winds under an arched bridge. A tan-colored building complex sits on a low hill to our left of center. Across the back of the scene, smokey purple and muted mauve-pink mountains line the horizon, which comes about halfway up the composition. The vivid yellow sun is low on the horizon to our left. A few light gray clouds skim across the sky, which deepens from pale yellow along the horizon to light blue along the top of the painting. The artist signed and dated the work on a stone near the man next to the sundial: “T. Cole 1837.” He also signed the front face of the tall pedestal to our left with the same text, though it is difficult to make out.
Thomas Cole, America's leading landscape painter during the first half of the nineteenth century, was born on February 1, 1801 in Bolton-le-Moor, England. Before emigrating with his family to the United States in 1818, he served as an engraver's assistant and as an apprentice to a designer of calico prints. Cole worked briefly as an engraver in Philadelphia before joining his family in Steubenville, Ohio, in 1819. While in Ohio he apparently learned the rudiments of oil painting from an itinerant portrait painter named Stein. In 1823, during a stay in Pittsburgh, Cole began drawing from nature, creating closely observed and intensely expressive images of trees and branches. Later that year he returned to Philadelphia, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and worked in a variety of art-related jobs.
In April 1825 Cole moved to New York, where his family had also relocated. That summer he made an extensive sketching tour up the Hudson River and into the Catskill Mountains. In late October 1825 three of his landscapes were sold to three prominent figures in the young nation's art community, John Trumbull (1756-1843), William Dunlap (1766-1839), and Asher B. Durand (1796-1886). In January 1826 Cole was elected a founding member of the National Academy of Design, and his works were increasingly in demand with leading patrons such as Daniel Wadsworth (1771-1848) of Hartford and Robert Gilmor, Jr. (1774-1848) of Baltimore.
Although Cole had ample commissions in the late 1820s to paint pictures of American scenery, his ambition was to create a "higher style of landscape" that could express moral or religious meanings. His first major efforts in this vein met with mixed reviews, and he decided study and travel in Europe were necessary. In June 1829 Cole sailed for England, where he studied the works of Old Masters and also met Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837). He subsequently traveled in France and in Italy, with lengthy stays in Rome and Florence. While in Italy he conceived of a multi-part landscape series tracing the rise and fall of an archetypal civilization. Although he failed to interest Gilmor in commissioning the series, upon his return to America in 1832 Cole did manage to convince the retired New York merchant Luman Reed (1785-1836) to support his grand project. The result, the five canvas Course of Empire (New-York Historical Society), was completed in 1836 and received considerable popular attention and generally favorable reviews.
Cole continued to paint American landscapes in the 1830s and early 1840s, but much of his energy in these years went into the creation of complex imaginary works such as The Departure and The Return (1837, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Corcoran Collection) and the two versions of The Voyage of Life (1839-1840, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, and 1842, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). In 1836 he married Maria Barstow and settled in Catskill, New York, a small village on the west side of the Hudson and close to the Catskill Mountains. That same year Cole, who was throughout his career a prolific writer of prose and poetry, published his "Essay on American Scenery" in the American Monthly Magazine, in which he expressed many of his most deeply felt convictions about landscape painting.
In 1841 Cole make a second trip abroad, with extensive travel in Italy, including a memorable visit to Sicily that resulted in several views of Mt. Etna. He returned to Catskill in 1842; in 1844 he accepted the young Frederic Edwin Church as a pupil on Daniel Wadsworth's recommendation. In the mid and late 1840s Cole painted many impressive American landscapes, which are notable for an increased accuracy in the depiction of atmosphere and light. At the same time he labored, ultimately without success, to complete a five-part series called The Cross and the World, in which he endeavored to portray the individual's quest for spiritual knowledge and salvation.
Cole's premature death in Catskill on February 11, 1848, was universally mourned and a comprehensive memorial exhibition of his works was quickly organized in New York. His influence on the course of American landscape painting was profound and his works influenced numerous younger painters who matured in the late 1840s and early 1850s, most notably Jasper F. Cropsey and Church.
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The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is a world-class art museum that displays one of the largest collections of masterpieces in the world including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and decorative arts from the 13th century to the present. The National Gallery of Art collection includes an extensive survey of works of American, British, Italian, Flemish, Spanish, Dutch, French and German art. With its prime location on the National Mall, surrounded by the Smithsonian Institution, visitors often think that the museum is a part of the Smithsonian. It is a separate entity and is supported by a combination of private and public funds. Admission is free. The museum offers a wide range of educational programs, lectures, guided tours, films, and concerts.
The original neoclassical building, the West Building includes European (13th-early 20th century) and American (18th-early 20th century) paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and temporary exhibitions. The National Gallery of Art was opened to the public in 1941 with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The original collection of masterpieces was provided by Mellon, who was the U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain in the 1930s. Mellon collected European masterpieces and many of the Gallery’s original works were once owned by Catherine II of Russia and purchased in the early 1930s by Mellon from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The NGA's collection galleries and Sculpture Garden display European and American paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts. Paintings in the permanent collection date from the Middle Ages to the present. The Italian Renaissance collection includes two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the tondo of the Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli work on the same subject, Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods, Ginevra de' Benci (the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas) and groups of works by Titian and Raphael.
The collections include paintings by many European masters, including a version of Saint Martin and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach the Elder, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture and decorative arts includes such works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a collection of work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit Institute of Arts).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gallery_of_Art
Andrew W. Mellon, who pledged both the resources to construct the National Gallery of Art as well as his high-quality art collection, is rightly known as the founder of the gallery. But his bequest numbered less than two hundred paintings and sculptures—not nearly enough to fill the gallery’s massive rooms. This, however, was a feature, not a failure of Mellon’s vision; he anticipated that the gallery eventually would be filled not only by his own collection, but also by additional donations from other private collectors. By design, then, it was both Andrew Mellon and those who followed his lead—among them, eight men and women known as the Founding Benefactors—to whom the gallery owes its premier reputation as a national art museum. At the gallery’s opening in 1941, President Roosevelt stated, “the dedication of this Gallery to a living past, and to a greater and more richly living future, is the measure of the earnestness of our intention that the freedom of the human spirit shall go on.”
www.doaks.org/resources/cultural-philanthropy/national-ga...
..
________________________________
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...
.