365 Days at the Met

 July 19, 2020 Gallery 808 centers on British landscape painters of the first half of the 19th century. It's anchored by three large canvases: an iconic John Constable painting of Salisbury Cathedral  and two works by Joseph Mallord William Turner.  The two Turners have similar formats (approximately 44 inches wide and 32 inches high), and both show Turner's skill in depicting the reflections of boats and buildings in water and in conveying atmospheric effects. I like one immensely, the other not, and it' s easy to believe that the difference in subject matter accounts for the difference in my reactions.   Turner has never been one of my favorites, but the painting I like so much makes me wish I'd seen the recent Turner show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  Made in 1835 and titled ""Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute," it shows a scene on the Grand Canal, lively with gondolas, cargo-laden boats, and people congregating on the steps of La Sa...

July 14, 2022 When will those closed galleries reopen, I wonder? In any event, Gallery 807 contains oils  by northern European painters working at or near home rather than in Italy. Aside from their subjects, would I be able to distinguish these paintings from those made by their French or Italian counterparts on the basis of style? I doubt it. Still, something about these works strikes me as, perhaps, a little less polished, a little more provincial, a bit removed stylistically from the centers of artistic innovation.  But maybe that is just silly, or plain wrong.  Many of the paintings on display are landscapes that seek to capture the sublime in nature, but the two I chose for today's entry are a view of the Copenhagen harbor and a portrait of a young man. The harbor scene is by Johan Christian Dahl, a Norwegian-born painter who died in Dresden, where there was presumably a much livelier cultural scene than in Dahl's native Bergen.  The 1846 painting, which measur...

  July 7, 2022 And - a perfect segue to the last entry - the theme of Gallery 806 is "The Lure of Rome." This rubric  provides a rationale for grouping together works that represent a disparate assortment of genres: mostly  landscapes (often with ruins) but also a couple of genre scenes, a painting of a brigand and his wife in prayer beside a roadside shrine (apparently, brigands in the mountains outside Rome were known for both their criminality and their piety), a Flagellation of Christ, and a study of a female nude. presumably included because the artist who painted her described her as one of the "four most beautiful girls that you could have as a model in Rome."  Most of the works are small, but there are also a couple of large canvases depicting imagined classical figures set in a landscape. One if these shows a Roman orator, Silius Italicus, declaiming Virgil's verses at the poet's tomb near Naples. I never knew that this is where Virgil is buried - I...

 July 5, 2022 Galleries 802-804 are closed (due to a staffing shortage after the holiday, perhaps?).  Gallery 805 is lined with 33 small  oil landscapes,  most dating to the early decades of the 19th century, when, according to the introductory signage, plein air painting gained in popularity.  The sign further notes that these small paintings were generally intended as sketches, undertaken to train the eye and the hand and not meant for public display. That said, many appear fully realized to me. The gallery is a reminder of the ongoing importance of Italy as a destination for artists. Most of the painters featured were French or Flemish, but scenes of Italy predominate in their work. (French artists did not begin exploring their own landscape until the 1830s, a placard tells me.)  Ancient Roman ruins and Tivoli were favorite subjects.  It's probably inevitable that I chose an Italian scene for today's entry. I'd never heard of Francois Edouard Picot,...

 July 1, 2022 Gallery 801 is devoted primarily to paintings by Ingres,  Gericault, and Delacroix. Many of the works are small, dark, and stacked on top of one another - not easy to see. The introductory placard comments on Delacroix's use of color and his influence on later painters in this regard, but only one canvas, a large panel whose subject is a basket of flowers, gives evidence of his lively palette. I chose today's work, an 1844 portrait by Ingres of Edmond Cave' , measuring approximately 16" X 13", for two reasons. First, Cave' was so incredibly handsome!  (He bears a striking resemblance, I think, to the director of my former tutoring program,  Peter Ginna, below)  Fifty years old when the portrait was painted, Cave' looks much younger:  although his hair is a distinguished gray around the temples, his face, shown in three-fourths view, has few lines.  A slight smile plays on his lips, and he seems to exude masculinity and confidence. In fact...