Day 253 - Tiffany fountain

 

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 sculpting figures in the nude (although genitalia are almost always concealed). I never before realized that the original of Saint-Gaudens' nude sculpture of Diana drawing her bow while poised on tiptoe was intended to serve as a weathervane atop the original Madison Square Garden building! Nudity extends to Biblical subjects: a statue of Ruth, kneeling to glean, exposes the Moabite woman's bared breast. 

But I have to assume that Neoclassicism served additional purposes besides allowing artists to depict nudes. I suspect that patrons who commissioned statues of neoclassical figures wanted to signal their erudition and awareness of classical culture,  and, during the Gilded Age, to make it clear that, although  they were plutocrats, they were refined plutocrats.

The gallery is also home to several works by Tiffany, and today's object is one of these. a glass mosaic fountain perhaps 12 feet high and 10 feet across, that may have been created as a preliminary design for a large commission for Edward Bok, who headed the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia.  Square, hexagonal, and octagonal tesserae in gold and various shades of blue form a frame around the internal scene, which shows a garden and is composed of irregularly shaped. iridescent tesserae in a restful palette of mostly blue, green, and beige tones  In the foreground of the scene is a body of water,  contained by a stone wall lined on the right by a balustrade and topped by a large urn filled with cascading pink flowers. These flowers are reflected in the water and, along with the water lilies floating on the surface and two white swans, add highlights to the color scheme.  The signage says that the work was based on designs by Maxfield Parrish; if so, the cypress trees and rolling hills in the background suggest to me that Parrish visited and was much taken with Tivoli.  I overhear a visitor say that the vertical sides of the frame are lined with mirrors that reflect the luminescence of the water and the sky, and indeed they are; I am not sure I would have noticed this myself. And, just as I'm about to walk away, I realize that the fountain really is a  fountain, with gurgling water issuing from a spigot in the center and running down walls that look like miniature grottoes on either side. I've never been a huge fan of Tiffany, but this really is quite an exceptional piece.

I suppose I also feel connected to the work because Edward Bok was the grandfather of Derek Bok. I Google him and learn that, besides becoming enormously wealthy,  he was quite politically progressive, as were his son and grandson. It is nice to think that the Tiffany mosaics were commissioned for an office building and the enjoyment of all the company's employees, rather than for  Bok's mansion and his private delectation. 

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On my next trip to the museum, I wanted to see if I could take a picture that is lighter at the top. The answer is no, not only because the overhanging frame casts a shadow but also because the tesserae at the top of the panel are a deeper blue than those below.