365 Days at the Met

 May 21, 2022 Gallery 771 is devoted to portraiture during the Gilded Age. The artists on display depicted their subjects in various ways. One common element, the signage notes, is the influence of Velazquez, evident in the shallow,  monochrome backgrounds from which figures emerge in silhouette.  I wonder to what extent the Spanish painter's influence was transmitted through Manet, who revered Velazquez and whom at least some of the Americans met when studying in Paris. Three paintings especially impress me. John Singer Sargent's "The Wyndham Sisters: Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Mrs. Tennant," executed in 1899, is truly portraiture in the grand style, and on the grand  scale, too - perhaps 12 feet high and 9 feet wide. The figures occupy only the bottom part of the canvas. Two of the sisters sit side by side on a divan. The third stands behind, her body turned away in three-quarter view, the better to show off her long, elegant nose and Sargent's adeptness in pa

 May 12, 2022 Gallery 770 is devoted to works by American Impressionists. In truth, most of them don't strike me as all that Impressionist, or as all that noteworthy.  I am, however, interested to learn that John Singer Sargent, several of whose canvases hang here, met Monet in 1876 and was inspired to experiment with the style. Furthermore, while I had always thought of Sargent as the quintessential society painter, it turns out that he also painted people at work.  One of his paintings depicts quarrymen at Carrara.  Another, the subject of today's entry, is entitled "Egyptians Raising Water from the Nile." According to the signage, Sargent received a commission to paint a mural cycle for the Boston Public Library and decided that its theme would be the history of religion - by which, as a Google search reveals, he meant Near Eastern religions (Egyptian and Assyrian belief systems, Judaism, Christianity). Google also tells me that one of the murals provoked considera

May 9, 2022 Gallery 769 displays works painted between 1880 and 1920 by American Impressionists (especially William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam) and Realists (notably, George Bellows and Rockwell Kent). Two Hassam works are the subject of today's entry. I love them both, for different reasons. Who wouldn't love "Celia Thaxter's Garden, Isle of Shoals, Maine"?  A luxuriant field of wildflowers occupies the foreground of this small painting (perhaps 24" long X 18" high), which Hassam painted in 1890. Bright red poppies capture the eye and contrast with the beige of the rocky coast and the blue of sea and sky in the background. The picture is at once serene and vibrant; Hassam's training as an Impressionist is evident. The artist painted "The Church at Gloucester" some 30 years later, in 1918; its style is more realistic. In the work (which measures about 28" high and 24" wide), a pathway lined by tall trees that cast soft shadow

May 5, 2022 Gallery 768 is home to paintings and sculptures that exemplify a popular subject for American artists at the turn of the 20th century: upper-class women, sometimes accompanied by their children, in well-appointed settings and at leisure (of which, given the plethora of domestic servants, they must have had a great deal).  Many of the works are straightforward, but a couple strike  me as curious. One of these is a large oil painting (perhaps five feet wide and four feet high) by JohnWhite Alexander completed in 1895 and entitled "Repose." A single figure occupies most of the canvas: a woman in a white dress stretched out  on  a divan, her upper body resting on a rose-colored pillow.The placard  notes that Alexander lived in Paris during the 1890s and "achieved international success with his studies of female figures gracefully posed in elegant interiors."  It goes on to say that the work reflects the contemporary French taste for sensual images of women;