Day 286- Bingham, "Fur Traders Descending the Mississippi"

March 4, 2022


Gallery 757 displays genre paintings dating from 1830 to 1860, most of whose artists are unknown to me.  Several of the paintings, which show scenes of domestic life, were done by the only woman to gain prominence in the field, Lilly Martin Spencer.

One work of interest is a small 1827 cityscape of Five Points in Lower Manhattan, a low-income area known for its criminal activity.  According to the placard, the artist is unidentified, but the image was well known, having been reproduced in an 1855 guidebook to New York City. The streets are filled with people in a roiling scene that reminds me of Pieter Bruegel. But, annoyingly, the painting is hung high on the wall, above another painting, and it's practically impossible to make out what the figures are doing. 

It's probably inevitable that I'm drawn to an image familiar to me, George Caleb Bingham's 1845 painting,"Fur Traders Descending the Mississippi." But while I instantly recognize the work (which measures about 36 inches wide and 24 inches high), I realize I've never really looked carefully at it before.  This time I notice many details: the outsize cat perched at the front of the boat; the funny conical hat and the grizzled appearance of the man plying the oar at the rear; the rounded rosy cheeks and bright blue shirt of the younger man (the older man's son?); the snags sticking up out of the water and out of the copse of trees in the background. 

But mostly what I note is the immensity of the sky, which occupies a good half of the image, and of the river. itself. River and sky fade together in the mist. There's justification for hanging the painting in a gallery whose theme is genre painting. But there's also reason to consider the work a landscape (or a riverscape, if there is such a word) broken by human figures. 




 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 349 - Charles Ray horse

Image
June 19, 2923  Gallery 917 holds the Philip Guston painting I wrote about earlier (day 341).  Gallery 918 is home to just one work: a huge (perhaps   16 feet long and   10 feet high) granite bas-relief by a contemporary American sculptor, Charles Ray, who was born in 1953. The bas-relief, sculpted in 2019, is entitled “Two Horses,” which are seen in full-body profile. But you have to look closely to see the second horse, whose head and neck are in much lower relief than the horse in the foreground, and whose torso is almost completely obscured. The main giveaway that more than one horse is depicted are the six hooves at the bottom of the image. The striations in the granite at the bottom of the relief suggest that the horses are fording a stream, with water  covering their lower legs. The sculptor has done a remarkable job of capturing the front horse’s bony legs, the musculature of its shoulder, the sinews of its neck, the feathery texture of its mane.   The caption notes that horses
Read more

Day 360 - The Wentworth room

Image
 May 18, 2024 When I enter this room (gallery 711), which was taken from a house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that was built in 1695-1700 for John Wentworth and his wife, I'm immediately struck by how much grander it seems than the Ipswich room, in spirit if not in scale. (The Wentworth room appears to me to measure about 35 feet long and 20 feet wide.)  For one thing, the fireplace, set against the long wall, is framed by beautiful dark wood paneling. (Such paneling may have lined the other walls as well, but if so, it has disappeared.) The single placard presents only very basic information about the room, but it includes  a QR code, which I dutifully scan, and to my surprise, once I've joined the Met's wifi, the website opens and contains much more detail.   I have to remind myself that, as with other period rooms, the furnishings in this room didn't come from the Wentworth home. Instead, they reflect  Met curators' knowledge about furniture styles and the curato
Read more

Day 356 - Medieval sculpture

Image
 May 7, 2024 Gallery 520 is at the area behind the large choir screen in the Medieval Art galleries. (At Christmas, the front of that screen is the site of the "angel tree" and the Neapolitan creche, where I make an annual pilgrimage; the figures of peasants tending their flocks and coming to adore the Christ child never fail  to move me.)  The gallery contains tapesetries, a large coffer, and a 14th-century Italian column head showing Saint Veronica holding up her veil on which a rather ugly head of Christ appears. A display case holds a parchment from 1466-67, during the War of the Roses, that charts the genealogy of the kings of England.  Edward IV's claim to the throne is substantiated by the inclusion among his forebears of King David, Alexander the Great, King Arthur, and William the Conqueror.   Most of the gallery, however, is devoted to sculpture.  Dating from about 1325 to 1550, the statuary comes from all over Western Europe (France, Germany, the Low Countries,
Read more