365 Days at the Met

 July 29, 2021 How quickly styles change is made abundantly clear in gallery 705, which houses display cases of neoclassical and rococo revival silver and porcelain, along with three tall oil lamps, dating from 1800 to 1850 or so. The neoclassical porcelain objects are heavy on gilding.  The rococo silver pitchers, tureens, and goblets are elaborately decorated with  repousse' designs of leaves, flowers, and curlicues of all kinds. It's interesting to see the aesthetic preferences of Americans of the first half of the 19th century, as reflected in these objects. It's conspicuous consumption, with the emphasis on conspicuous.  I dislike most of what I see.  Quite different from these neoclassical and rococo works are the objects in a display case of Rockingham ware, earthenware decorated with a mottled brown glaze. The style, which originated in England and was brought to the U.S. by immigrant potters, was popular between 1825 and 1870, according to the placard. ...

  July 22, 2021 Gallery 704 lives up to the promise suggested by my last entry. Its glass cases contain displays of stoneware, earthenware, glass, pewter, and silver items made in the colonies and the early republic during the 1700s and early 1800s. Interestingly, there are also cases of imported luxury items- ornate, highly rococo silver imported from England from the 1740s through the 1770s and English and Chinese ceramic and porcelain bowls made for the American market in the  decades after the American Revolution. It's interesting to see English plates and jugs decorated with images of George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette entering New York City, and Boston Harbor.  Evidently, British ceramics and porcelain manufacturers did not hold a lasting grudge about having lost the 13 colonies - maybe the latter were too much of a drain on money and manpower anyway. Or maybe capitalist instincts outweighed political ones: The manufacturers were happy to incorporate whatev...

July 19, 2021 What is labeled "702" on the map appears to be a corridor leading to gallery 700. In pre-Covid times, it housed a small sales desk; now it houses no art at all. So I moved on to gallery 703, on the second floor. Its primary feature is the glass-walled elevator that goes down to the main level, but it does contain two works of art: a rather grand mahogany clock, which  was made in New York in 1795, and this Neoclassical marble sculpture. Executed in 1874 by William Henry Rinehart and measuring roughly five feet long and three feet high,  it shows Latona, the Roman goddess of night, along with her sleeping children (fathered by Jupiter), Apollo and Diana, (I have to assume Diana is the one with the braid down her back, since the nude children's genitals are not visible.)  The caption says that Rinehart worked in Rome, where he was quite successful, and this work strikes me as very accomplished. The folds in Latona's garment contrast with the smoothness of ...

July 15, 2021 Gallery 701 serves largely as a corridor to the American Wing Cafe and is home to a number of well-known Tiffany windows. One of these, a view of Oyster Bay framed by wisteria vines, was, I learn, commissioned for the New York town house of one William Skinner as a reminder of Wistariahurst, his family estate in Holyoke, MA!  It's strange to think of Holyoke, now one of the most depressed cities in the state, as having residents with that kind of wealth, but I suppose that at the end of the 19th century, its mills were humming and its economy thriving   I suspect that these  windows are all that many visitors look at en route to lunch.  That would be too bad, because the gallery has a number of works that are interesting from a history of culture perspective, if nothing else. For instance, there's a marble relief that Jacob Schiff commissioned Saint-Gaudens to sculpt of his two young children, named (unfortunately) Frieda Fanny and Mortimer Leo....

  July 9, 2021 The remaining 600 galleries are home to temporary exhibitions, so today brings me to gallery 700, the first gallery in the American Wing.  It's an enormous and airy space, two stories high, with a vaulted glass roof. Forming one side of the gallery is the imposing stone facade of the Branch Bank of the United States, which was constructed in 1825 and stood on Wall Street; the facade was acquired by the Met after the bank building was torn down in 1915. Several other works in the gallery were reclaimed from structures since demolished, leading me to reflect about how tastes change over time. Ionic capitals mark the bank's facade and help make the gallery a fitting repository for the many 19th-century statues of Greco-Roman gods and other figures from mythology. Only after I read the signage did the label "neoclassical" occur to me, but most of the works are neoclassical in design.  As during the Renaissance, classical subjects provided a rationale for sc...