Hello everybody and welcome back to My Weekly Flickr.
We’re getting our first taste of winter now, below freezing temperatures, a wind to boot and a blindingly bright sun that offers no warmth. I’m glad the only time I had to spend outside was on my morning walk. I almost fell on ice when the I walked by one house whose sprinklers had gone on. All summer I have to duck as I walk by these sprinklers which also water the sidewalk. Why someone needs to water their lawn in 18 degree weather is beyond me. The weatherman says this is unseasonably cold and in a few days we should return to more temperate weather.
Last weekend I took a friend of mine to Washington D.C. to the National Gallery of Art to see an exhibit I have been waiting to see for a long time, Vermeer and The Masters of Genre Painting. It was sensational.
We took Amtrak down on Saturday afternoon and due to track work our train ran 40 minutes late so we arrived around 6PM. We had trouble figuring out the Metro card vending machine as did everyone else in the station. I asked the Guard and he explained and we were able to buy our cards. My friend’s GPS has walking instructions and we used that to navigate to the hotel from the subway station.
We checked into the hotel by which time the museums had all closed so we walked to the Lincoln Memorial as well as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and then walked back to the hotel and had dinner. It rained but otherwise it was fairly mild, especially for this time of year.
The next day started at 8AM when I knocked on my friend’s door and we went down to breakfast. As we had so much time, after checking out, we decided to take the long walk to the Freer Museum which opens at 10AM, an hour before the National Gallery opens. The Freer has an outstanding permanent collection and we spent an hour going through their galleries. The Freer is home to the Peacock Room which was designed by James McNeill Whistler for a wealthy British shipping magnate, Frederick Richards Leyland. Mr. Freer anonymously purchased the entire room in 1904 from Leyland's heirs and had the contents of the Peacock Room installed in his Detroit mansion. After his death in 1919, the Peacock Room was permanently installed in the Freer Gallery of Art. This Wikipedia link will explain the details from design to finish to its ultimate arrival at the Museum. There are two views of the room on the website, as well as a separate image of Whistler’s painting. Click on the image at the top and open a three image slide show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peacock_Room We subsequently walked through the American, Chinese and Japanese galleries where we saw lovely paintings by Sargent, Whistler and Homer as well as Japanese screens and Chinese scrolls. At 11AM we walked across the mall to the National Gallery.
There was a line for the Vermeer but it moved fairly quickly and after about 30 minutes we were inside. It was spectacular! There were about 70 paintings in the exhibit and all were first class. There were 10 Vermeers. There are only 34 paintings in the world that are attributed to Vermeer and one of these was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and to date has not been recovered. So this selection is roughly a third of his output. I’ve used links from Wikipedia since they have good illustrations as well as information on each of the individual paintings.
I’ve grouped four paintings below as they all have the same model, wearing her fabulous yellow, ermine trimmed jacket and pearls as in one of the Frick’s Vermeers, Mistress with Maid.
https://collections.frick.org/objects/274/mistress-and-maid In The Love Letter, the maid is also present.
Woman with a Pearl Necklace - Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_with_a_Pearl_NecklaceA Lady Writing a Letter – National Gallery of Art, D.C.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Lady_Writing_a_LetterWoman with a Lute - Metropolitan Museum of Art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_with_a_Lute The Love Letter - Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-1595The Lacemaker and the Astronomer both come from the Louvre.
The Lacemaker
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/catalogue/lacemaker.htmlAstronomer
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/catalogue/astronomer.htmlIn addition to A Lady Writing (above), A woman Holding a Balance is from the National Gallery of Art in D.C
A Woman Holding a Balance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_Holding_a_Balance The Geographer, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographer Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Writing_a_Letter_with_her_Maid Lady seated at a Virginal, National Gallery of London
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Seated_at_a_Virginal The rest of the exhibit was superb as well; here are a few that particularly struck me. There were a number of paintings from private collections.
The Lacemaker – Nicolaes Maes – This was hung to the right of Vermeer’s version. It comes from the Met.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436932There were a number of paintings by Gerard ter Borch another favorite of mine. He had his own magnificent exhibit at the National Gallery some years ago which I very much enjoyed. Here are four from this show.
The Sleeping Soldier is from the Taft Museum in Ohio
http://www.taftmuseum.org/collections/collection_highlights/12-1931-398_tma-06-09Woman Sealing Her Letter with Her Maid is from a private collection, imagine having this painting on your living room wall.
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/dutch-painters/masters/terborch_f.html Two Women Making Music with a Page or The Concert – This is from the Louvre
http://the-athenaeum.org/art/detail.php?ID=134955 Woman Writing a Letter from the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery in the Netherlands
http://the-athenaeum.org/art/detail.php?ID=117749 Two paintings by Gerrit Dou
Astronomer by Candlelight is from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, this striking painting was a favorite for both of us.
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/dutch-painters/dou_c.html Dropsical Woman is from the Louvre
https://www.wga.hu/art/d/dou/2/drops_wo.jpg And finally a painting by Samuel Van Hoogstraten, an artist I’m unfamiliar with.
View of an Interior or The Slippers – There’s a lot going on in this painting, not the least of which is a reproduction of a Ter Borch painting on the wall in the back. That painting by Ter Borch was also in the exhibit.
https://useum.org/artwork/View-of-an-Interior-or-The-Slippers-Samuel-van-HoogstratenThis should give you some idea of the broadness of the exhibit; there were many more artists represented as well and as I said everything in the exhibit was worthwhile.
The second exhibit we visited at the Gallery was Fragonard: The Fantasy Figures. This was a small exhibit of lovely, colorful paintings and you can see a sample of them at the website link below.
https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2017/fragonard-the-fantasy-figures.html We stopped for lunch and then proceeded to the East Building where Contemporary art lives. This was a quick visit as I only wanted to visit with the two Edward Hopper paintings in the Museum’s collection.
Cape Cod Evening
https://www.nga.gov/Collection/art-object-page.61252.html Groundswell
https://www.nga.gov/Collection/art-object-page.131206.html Seeing them again was a treat.
We went back to the West Wing and wandered through the permanent collection which rivals the Metropolitan Museum in its enormity and brilliance while looking for the final exhibit that I had come to see, Bosch to Bloemaert: Early Netherlandish Drawings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. By the time we found it I was concerned that we wouldn’t have enough time to visit the Phillips Museum so we rather rushed through the galleries. There were lovely things to see and you can see some of them at the website link.
https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2017/bosch-to-bloemaert-early-netherlandish-drawings.html From the Gallery we went to the Phillips Museum to see an exhibit built around Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, arguably his greatest painting. It has a room of its own and you enter through a doorway and turn left and there it is in all its magnificence. The rest of the exhibit was paintings by Renoir that he created as preliminary to the major opus as well as paintings by and of his peers. Afterwards we explored the rest of the permanent collection. I was disappointed that half the collection wasn’t on display as the original building housing the collection was under renovation but I would have come regardless as I wanted to see the Luncheon painting again.
This is a link to the Wikipedia page for Luncheon of the Boating Party with a nice image which can be enlarged and other details about the painting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luncheon_of_the_Boating_Party The Phillips has a room dedicated to the abstract artist Mark Rothko. I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion that I totally don’t get the appeal of his art while my brother, and most art critics, consider him a genius. The room is about 12 feet square with a painting on each of the four walls. I told my friend about the disagreement I have with my brother about Rothko and we entered the room to sit in the middle and look at the paintings for a minute. She wasn’t able to garner anything from them either. When we exited the room a young woman was entering and she turned to her friend and said, I don’t get this at all but my brother loves him, a comment which made both of us laugh.
I would have enjoyed this trip under any circumstances but having someone along with me to discuss it with really made it special. And my friend made clear that she is amenable to future trips.
Well, if anyone is still reading at this point you will be rewarded now with the Flickrs.
Andy G.
Happy Halloween 2017
https://www.flickr.com/photos/briannagrant/37353308184/ IMG_0715
https://www.flickr.com/photos/brenda_daviscd87/35300214184/At Sissy Manor
Betty's Pub 20.1
Topic: As we sadly bid farewell to the Summer Flickr in walks the Fall Flickr! (Read 14817 times)
