365 Days at the Met

June 29, 2024 I have the devil of a time finding gallery 717.  The museum map isn't helpful because it doesn't indicate that  the gallery, along with a number of others, is on a different level from other American Wing galleries, accessible by an elevator that labels this level as "Period rooms - handicapped access only." (It turns out that there's also a back stairway to reach these galleries, but who would know?)  A museum guard on the third floor directs me to the second floor, while a guard there directs me to the third floor before realizing that my destination is a floor in between.  When I at last locate the gallery, I'm forced to reckon once again with the somewhat absurd, or at least tome-dependent, nature of my project.  The gallery has been reopened relatively recently, and I find that works that I know I've seen elsewhere - Houdon's bust of Benjamin Franklin, Copley's oil sketch of his "Watson and the Shark" painting -have now...

June 24, 2024 I knew beforehand that gallery 716 is just a stairwell. Not much to see, I thought - it called into question this whole "[just one] gallery a day" idea.  The visit seemed like an excuse to get in my daily exercise by walking across the park and back. But when I got there,  I was glad I'd come. Monday is  traditionally the Met's slowest day, and when I arrived, about 20 minutes after the museum opened,  the route to the American galleries through the Egyptian collection seemed practically deserted and very peaceful. I felt envious of the people who were seeing the Temple of Dendur for the first time without all the usual hustle and bustle around them.  My stay in the museum was brief, and by the time I left, the place was much more lively, which is all to the good for the museum, if not necessarily for the viewer's experience. And the stairwell repaid careful looking. It comes from the Wentworth House, discussed in the Day 360 entry, which was built...

June 23, 2024 Gallery 714 is closed. (Will this project ever  get done?) Gallery 715 is really a large ell, perhaps 20 feet long and 11 feet wide, off of gallery 713. Its centerpiece is a fireplace wall that was taken from the Benjamin Hasbrouck House,  built around 1750 in Ulster County, New York.  The wall is paneled in gumwood, a native tree whose handsome dark wood was used almost exclusively in New York State.  The cast iron fireback at the center of the fireplace depicts an armed soldier. The space's other contents include a gateleg table, a large and imposing "kast," also of dark wood (this time cherry with white pine), and a rather awful painting of Christ healing a blind man by a New York-born artist of Dutch descent, Gerhardus Duyckinck. The caption says that Dutch settlers liked to look at paintings of religious subjects and often hung them in their dining rooms; I suppose the aim was to steer thoughts and conversation away from worldly things toward spiri...

  June 20, 2024 Gallery 713 is a good-sized space containing numerous examples of furniture, mostly chests and chairs, made at the turn of the 18th century. Introductory signage talks about the movement away from strict rectilinearity toward a freer style  that was influenced by Baroque artists in Europe. It also notes that new techniques in cabinet-making (e.g., dovetailing) made it possible to incorporate longer, flatter surfaces that were often veneered. I don't understand the technique involved and frankly don't care to learn more,  but I do know what I like.  One such piece is a high chest of drawers made in Boston in the first decades of the 18th century. Perhaps 5 1/2 feet high and 4 feet wide, the body of the chest is raised above the floor on turned legs and includes eight drawers of varying sizes with bras pulls. What makes the chest special for me is the beauty of the veneers. A placard says that the woods include black walnut, maple, poplar, hickory, and ...

  June 17, 2024 The sign outside gallery 712 characterizes the space as a period room, but additional descriptive materials acknowledge that this isn't really so . The room, taken from a house in Albany County that was built in 1751, contains objects that might have been found in a Hudson Valley Dutch home of that era, but these are exhibited as in any gallery, not arranged to resemble the interior of a room.  The room is so dark it makes me wonder whether my vision is going - I have to read captions using the flashlight app on my cell phone -- and why the Met even bothers, since the gallery is so uninviting. A narrow space adjacent to the main one focuses on construction methods, which were similar to those used iin the Netherlands. The description makes me more aware than ever that architecture as a field is replete with terms I don't know, among them  "anchor bents,""corbels," and "nogging,"  A feature of this space is the front door, which must...