365 Days at the Met

February 26, 2021 The theme of Gallery 620 is The Grand Tour - what the well-off, well-bred young man might see if he made this excursion in the 18th century. Since Italy was the principal destination of The Grand Tour, most of the paintings are by Italian artists and depict Italian scenes. There are lots of Canalettos and Guardis, and the surprise of my visit is to discover that the two artists, far from being interchangeable, as I had previously supposed, had quite distinctive styles: Canaletto painted with almost photographic precision, while Guardi's brushstrokes are much freer, almost impressionistic.  But inevitably, the two paintings I've chosen to write about are by Giovanni Paolo Panini, who was born in Piacenza in 1691 and died in Rome in 1765. I suspect the entry is an homage to Panini's painting of the interior of the Pantheon, now in the National Gallery in Washington, a nicely framed repro of which hung in my office for many years. ("I work so that I can ...

February 22, 2021 For weeks I have been walking through Gallery 620 en route to other galleries, noting that it is home to a work I have known all my life: Goya's portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga (the small boy in a red suit who holds on a tether his pet magpie, which three wide-eyed cats watch attentively).  It is featured in Alice Elizabeth Chase's Famous Paintings ,  a wonderful art primer for children that I loved as a child and that now sits on my coffee table.  (Betsy supervised my father when he held a student job at the Yale Art Gallery.)  Readily noticeable, too, is an appealing picture of a simply clad young woman holding a dog by Giacomo Ceruti, a Milanese painter whose dates are 1698-1767. The surprise element of today's entry is that the paintings I'm drawn to write about are not these two familiar works but two portraits that I had never noticed before, one by Ceruti and the other by Anton Raphael Mengs.  Once I really looked at these w...

February 15, 2021 Initially, Gallery 618 strikes me as a rather odd assemblage of landscapes and genre paintings (largely featuring musicians), the works of artists from all over Western Europe who found their way to Rome at some point in the 17th century. From the placard, it seems that the point of hanging these paintings together is to illustrate the emergence of new subjects that were  neither religious nor portraits celebrating state leaders, and that had a fresh appeal to collectors. My choices today seem to me directly inspired by the pandemic, in different ways. The first is a small  perhaps 26" X 15"), refined oil on canvas painted by Claude Lorrain in 1647.  Entitled"La Crescenza," it depicts, in the middle distance and situated on a slight rise against a light sky, a medieval fortress, complete with crenellated towers, that was turned into a country home. Situated on the outskirts of Rome, it was the residence of the Crescenzi family  In the cen...

February 8, 2021 A major snowstorm and many tasks that needed attending to kept me away from the museum for two weeks. It felt good to be back! Again, I was at first annoyed by the obligatory politically correct signage in Gallery 617,  which is devoted to Baroque portraiture.  A placard informs us that wealth in 17th century Europe often depended on the exploitation of others (since when hasn't wealth depended on exploitation?), and that those exploited included enslaved people who rarely appeared in portraits of the period.  And again, I was chagrined by my initial reaction. By the end of the visit, I realized that I had learned something new, and that the signage, although ham-fisted, had given me a different perspective on  the two paintings that are the focus of today's entry.   The first is Velasquez' celebrated portrait of his enslaved assistant,  Juan de Pareja.  Painted in oil on canvas and measuring about 28" by 28," the work was execute...