Day 284 - Portrait bust of Washington

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. Thus,  in Campeche's portrait of a woman in mourning, the sorrowful subject shows off her fabulous jewelry - diamond chandelier earrings, a choker composed of two strands of pearls, four rings, and a pearl-studded brooch depicting the Virgin of Sorrows. In contrast, in Ralph Earl's portrait of a Vermont matron, Mrs. Noah Smith, and her five children (who appear to range in age from about ten to a babe in arms and who all look remarkably like each other and like their mother), the figures are dressed in clothing that appears expensive (nice fabrics) but simple.

The gallery contains a handsome portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, who, it turns out,  painted 18 similar images that people signed up to get, either for themselves or as gifts. But positioned right next to the Stuart painting is the image of Washington I find most arresting: a marble portrait bust, perhaps 24 inches high, by Giuseppe Ceracchi, an Italian-born sculptor whose dates are 1751-1802.  The work was modeled from life in 1795, when Washington was 63. He is shown in the guise of a Roman, dressed in a cloak knotted at the shoulder, and with close-cropped curly locks.  The president looks his age - his chin sags - but also handsome and powerful. The signage notes that Washington's contemporaries regarded the bust as among the most lifelike images of of our first President.  The work again speaks to  the way in which citizens of the new republic identified with ancient Rome.