365 Days at the Met

 February 24, 2022 Gallery 756 is devoted to portraits and still lifes painted between 1800 and 1850. Most of the portraits are by artists whose names are at least somewhat familiar to me (although sometimes as landscape painters): Washington Alston, Asher Durand, Rembrandt Peale, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Thomas Sully (whose  full-length portrait of a very young - and, I suspect, considerably prettified-  Queen Victoria hangs here). I don't care for  most of these - they smack of sentimentality to me. But I do very much like an oil-on-canvas portrait of a Pawnee chief, Pes-Ke-Le-Cha-Co, painted by Henry Inman around 1832-1833. Measuring roughly 30 inches wide and 28 inches high., the work conveys a strong sense of the subject's  dignity. The chief is shown from the waist up; a cloak, lined with fur (buffalo?) and suspended from his left shoulder ,covers his otherwise bare chest and resembles a classical toga. His face is seen in three-quarters view, and the artis...

January 31, 2022 It was under 30 degrees outside this morning, and I did something I almost never do: treated myself to a taxi to the museum rather than risk having to wait several minutes for the crosstown bus. It was a wonderful expenditure of $15 - the cab was warm, and I basked in the sun that streamed in through the back window.  Gallery 754, a small room off of gallery 753, is closed, because of Covid, I'd guess. The introductory placard in gallery 755 bears the title, "Portraiture and the Atlantic World" - presumably the rationale for grouping together eight paintings, seven by American painters but featuring as subjects both Americans and Spanish officials in the New World, and an eighth by Jose Campeche, Puerto Rico's leading painter of the period (the late 18th and early 19th centuries).  On the basis of these works, I surmise that while the Americans preferred to be portrayed as wealthy but unostentatiously so, the Spaniards wanted to display their finery. ...