365 Days at the Met

January 25, 2021 The signage in Gallery 616 at first strikes me as annoyingly politically correct - it's mostly about French women painters of the 18th century. I have to confess, though, that the text turned out to be pretty interesting and instructive.  First off, the only woman painter of the period whose name I knew beforehand was Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun; I learned that there were a number of others. Second, women were constrained in the subjects they could paint: They were thought unworthy of executing history paintings (the most exalted genre, in the eyes of the Royal Academy) and relegated to painting still lifes and portraits. Third, only four women at a time were admitted to the Royal Academy. Fourth, works by women were generally considered inferior to those of their male counterparts. (Looking around this gallery,  I would be hard-pressed to claim that the paintings by women painters were superior to those of the male painters on  exhibit,  but they...

January 18, 2021 Gallery 615 carries me across the Channel to England in the 1700s. .  Most of the paintings in the room are portraits of aristos and other people wealthy enough to commission likenesses of themselves and their families. From the looks of it, 18th century Britain is a nation of men who are fond of their horses and dogs, women with elaborately curled and powdered coiffures, and rosy-cheeked children.  The painting to which I'm most drawn is a self-portrait by George Romney.  About 30" high and 26" wide and painted in oil on canvas, the work dates to 1795, when the artist was 61. He shows himself in three-quarter view, from the chest up, against a dark background, so that our attention immediately goes to the sitter's face and his cravat, the only elements of color in the composition. The artist's son described his father's visage as showing "a certain expression of languor that indicates the approach of disease,"  but I don't read ...

 January 15, 2021 Galleries 609 through 613, it turns out, are undergoing restoration. My trek through the museum in search of the next available gallery brings me through rooms with wonderful, familiar works by Goya, Velazquez, Caravaggio, Van Dyke, and many others. Gallery 614, I find, is devoted to the French neoclassicists. The gallery contains Jacques-Louis David's famous painting of the death of Socrates, along with many portraits of contemporary notables, including a well-known image of Benjamin Franklin and two paintings of Talleyrand.  Houdon busts of Diderot and Voltaire, which used to be in the sculpture galleries, have been moved here, although in my view they should be displayed more prominently; they're really fine. What are quite prominent are two placards that are saturated with political correctness, maybe even self-righteousness. One reminds us that the neoclassicists idealized the white male body (although I think women's bodies were also pretty...

 January 11, 2021 Gallery 608 (607 is still under renovation) is a large skylit space hung with works by 16th century High Renaissance painters working in Rome, Florence, and Venice. Some of these artists are familiar to me, others not.   My favorite is a work by an artist I didn't know, Francesco Salviati, who was born in Florence in 1510 and died in Rome in 1563. It's a portrait in oil on wood, perhaps 22" X 17", of Carlo Rimbotti, a Florentine physician, who was about 30 years old at the time this likeness was painted in 1548. The subject, dressed in a dark cloak, poses against a dark ground; only his face and his right hand, which holds a small box (medicines?) stand out. But what a face! He looks out with piercing, intelligent eyes, and I cannot look away from his gaze. It's one if the most intense, arresting portraits I've ever seen. The other picture that stops me in my tracks is a portrait by Titian of Filippo Archinto, a Catholic cleric who ...

January 9, 2021 Gallery 606 is another space hung with religious-themed paintings by 15th and early 16th century Italian and Northern artists.  Perhaps it's because it's such a respite from yet more Madonnas that the painting I chose as my favorite is a small oil on wood, about 18" X 18", of Saint Justina  of Padua. It was executed in the 1490s by Bartolomeo Montagna, a painter from Vicenza I'd never heard of before. Okay, the subject is nominally religious, but that seems to be an excuse to paint an attractive young woman attired in sumptuous clothing.and wearing a necklace and hair ornaments featuring rubies and pearls. The artist has lavished attention on Justina's embroidered and bejeweled bodice and the white satin puffs at her shoulders, which, along with her face, shown in three-quarters view, stand out against the dark ground. The signage notes the sword piercing her breast, an attribute of her martyrdom, but unless you look closely, it just looks like...

January 2, 2021 Gallery 605 leapfrogs from the religious  art of the Quattrocento to 18th century France and paintings that depict a wide array of secular subjects: portraits, scenes from the theater, images of courting couples,  genre scenes, and still-lifes showing the spoils of the hunt.  (The hunt was a popular aristocratic pastime, I read; these paintings have a few too many dead birds for my taste.)  It's interesting to see how the the preoccupations and artistic preferences of the aristocracy and of the rising haute bourgeoisie changed over the centuries. Today's choices are both paintings of individuals.  The first is a portrait in oil on canvas of the society portrait painter Jean Marc Nattier by his student and eventual son-in-law, Louis Tocque'. About 36" high and 26" wide, the painting shows Nattier from the waist up,  a palette resting in his left hand and a paintbrush held between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. He is d...