365 Days at the Met

October 23, 2020 Gallery 511 is a very large period room into which I suspect my whole apartment could fit with room to spare. Installed in 1748, it comes from Kirtlington Park, a manor in Oxfordshire owned by Sir James Dashwood, a name that strikes me as right out of Jane Austen or just about any other 18th or 19th century English author.  The room is so big that I think it must be a salon, but it turns out to be a dining room, built at a time, I read, when very few homes had separate dining rooms. It's no problem to imagine 50 people seated at the dining room table, which must have been grand indeed.   The chief decorative feature of the room is its stucco ornamentation. Native craftsmen learned this art, a placard says, from their Italian counterparts working in England.  Stucco wreaths and garlands frame two large oval mirrors set in one of the long walls of the rectangular room. (You can see my reflection, appropriately masked, in the photo of one of these ...

 October 19, 2020 Gallery 510 is all about tea. A sign at the entrance to the gallery describes the central role of the commodity (along with coffee, cocoa, and sugar) in driving 18th century commerce, the increasingly widespread consumption of the beverage among the middle classes as well as the elite, and  the way in which tea consumption acted as a spur to artistic creativity on the part of the British ceramics industry. Inevitably, the signage refers, too, to slavery and its inextricable link to the production of sugar.   At the center of the dimly lit room are two semicircles of tall, thin, brightly illuminated display cases on which scores of teapots are arranged.  Each display case is nine levels high, which means that the highest pots can't really be seen, while the lowest ones require that the viewer stoop down in order to to examine them carefully.  I hope the pots' positions are rotated from time to time. Once again, this room seems to be de...

October 5, 2020 T he small L-shaped space between galleries 509 and 510 feels less than satisfying to me, in large part  because it's so dark that I have to use the flashlight on my cell phone and crouch down to read a couple of captions, which are placed at about the level of my knees. Much of the display seeks to give the viewer a sense of the appearance of a late 17th century bedroom in a home grand enough to warrant a king's overnight stay.   It features an enormous bed with a high canopy from which draperies cascade down,  two elaborately carved armchairs with the original velvet upholstery that has somehow survived for more than three centuries, and a display of large Japanese porcelains that were probably brought to Europe by Dutch traders.  There's also a finely marquetried cabinet and a large mirror with an ornate gilded frame. The caption says that mirrors were customarily hung between two windows to bring light into spaces that I imagine might otherwi...

October 2, 2020 When I got back home and looked at an online map of the Met, I realized that the gallery I visited today is actually an extension of the one I visited last time. It's a bit hard to tell, since gallery numbers are placed high on the dark, rather dimly lit walls. In contrast, explanatory placards are placed low, requiring me to stoop and crouch in order to read them. The drama of these galleries has some costs. Further, I suspect that visitors are expected to get a good deal of information from "acoustiguides" available on their cell phones (at no cost, unlike the audioguides the Met previously rented out). In any event, the objects I see today and their explanations reprise the theme of increasing British craftsmanship and technical skill over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries. I learn a good deal. For example, I hadn't previously realized that there was an active tapestry manufactory established with royal backing at Mortlake (which, ...