Albert Bierstadt on a postage stamp

Our interest in art can be traced directly to our childhood enthusiasm for stamp-collecting, which taught us that Winslow Homer, James Whistler, and Frederic Remington were the world’s finest artists — why else would the United States Post Office have put engravings of their works on stamps?   We especially liked the 1962 stamp that showed Homer’s “Breezing Up” (since then we’ve seen the original at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.). To this day, Homer remains our favorite American artist.  (See my post on Whistler’s Mother.)

Nowadays we take a more casual interest in commemorative stamps, which after all are not beautifully engraved as they used to be. But Emsworth usually takes notice on the rare occasions on which the Postal Service decides to honor an artist. Currently, you can buy not one, but two tiny reproductions of art at the Post Office for 42 cents. This year’s “religious” Christmas stamp shows a portion of Sandro Botticelli’s “Virgin and Child With the Young John the Baptist,” painted around 1490.

The other “art” stamp at the Post Office commemorates the 19th-century American artist Albert Bierstadt, who specialized in paintings of the American West, and who has become one of our favorites. The image on the stamp is “Valley of the Yosemite,” painted in 1864, and it’s a good example of Bierstadt’s style, but its choice is a bit surprising. The original, which is in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is a relatively small painting, unlike the grand, large-scale paintings that made Bierstadt famous, like the panoramic, ten-foot-wide, endlessly detailed “The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak,” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Post Office’s choice, “Valley of the Yosemite,” is only about 14 by 22 inches and not especially well known.

Well, of course, we have a Bierstadt right here in Rochester. The Memorial Art Gallery’s picture, “The Sierras Near Lake Tahoe, California,” is also a western scene. It too is a modest-scale painting, only a little bigger than the one on the new stamp.

But my favorite Bierstadt isn’t either a Rocky Mountain scene or a ten-foot-wide panorama; it’s a picture of seals sporting and frolicking on an island off the California coast. Seal Rock is in Connecticut at the New Britain Museum of American Art.

American Impressionists at the Michener Art Museum

It’s well off the beaten path, but this the art museum junkie has found another small American art museum that he’d like to visit again if he ever has a chance. It’s the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which is about halfway between Philadelphia and Allentown.

The museum is, of course, named for the prolific late author of Hawaii and other historical novels; Emsworth used to read him (The Source was his personal favorite). It was Michener’s money and art collection that made the museum possible, and in fact the museum includes a small re-creation of his study, with his typewriter (the very typewriter he’s shown with in the picture above), some manuscripts, parts of his library, and so on. But the focus of the museum is on a modest collection of American art, not on Michener.

The Michener Art Museum is about 20 years old, and it’s a counterpart of sorts to the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. (See my post on the Griswold museum.) While the museum in Old Lyme focuses entirely on American impressionists who worked at the art colony there, like Willard Metcalf and Childe Hassam, the best part of the collection at the Michener consists of first-quality examples of painters who worked at the New Hope art colony in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, including two of my favorite American impressionists, Edward W. Redfield and Daniel Garber. (Redfield’s 1912 painting “Cherry Blossoms” is just above.)

The works of these Pennsylvania impressionists resonated strongly with Emsworth, a native of the Commonwealth. In the northwest part of the state where I grew up, not much has changed in the last hundred years; many of the old houses, barns, and garages are still standing. Redfield’s richly worked Fleecydale Road (above) was probably painted a hundred years ago (it has no date), but it’s a scene I recognized from my youth during the 1960s. It’s quintessentially Pennsylvanian, and of the paintings on display during my visit, I liked it best.

The pride and joy of the Michener Art Museum is a large, dramatic mural by Daniel Garber, dated 1926, entitled A Wooded Watershed, which is beautifully displayed at the end of the museum’s large gallery of Pennsylania impressionists. It’s at least 15 feet wide. I would have been interested to know where A Wooded Watershed was originally installed before this museum acquired it, but didn’t see anything about its history.

Some of Garber’s work has an almost magical, fairy-tale quality; one especially pleasing Garber painting entitled Springtime in the Village fell in this category. For reasons that are probably not obvious from my photos, Springtime in the Village, which is dated 1917, reminded me almost immediately of a 1892 painting by the French post-impressionist Paul Serusier titled Apple Picking that had appealed to us greatly when we saw it some years ago in an exhibition focusing on the School of Pont-Aven. An exhibit at the Michener indicated that Garber had studied in France for a couple of years; I wondered if Garber became familiar with Serusier’s work. Garber’s palette for this painting also reminded me of another Pont-Aven picture, Gauguin’s Christmas Night (The Blessing of the Oxen), which is now at the Indianapolis Art Museum.

I was struck once again with the fact that while hardly any European artists that we know in America today were painting in an impressionistic style after about 1910, many Americans continued to paint in an impressionistic style through the middle of the twentieth century. Most of the paintings I saw at the Michener Art Museum were impressionist landscapes. The finest, however, I felt, was an outstanding 1914 portrait by Garber of his wife in a kimono, entitled The Studio Wall.

Other American impressionists on display included Walter Schofield, William L. Lathrop, and George W. Sotter. In other, smaller galleries there were some modern paintings by Elsie Driggs, Karl Knaths, and Helen Frankenthaler, among others, and a few from the first part of the nineteenth century. I gather from the Michener Art Museum’s website that it has a much larger collection than it presently has room to display. For now, this is a small museum.

Better than nothing: American paintings in the stacks at the Met

Willard Metcalf's "The North Country," in storage at the Met

(October 11, 2008) Emsworth’s two previous visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art found the galleries of American art closed for renovations. On arriving for a visit last week, therefore, this art museum junkie prudently inquired first at the information desk. Yes, an elderly female cheerfully assured me, as she consulted a list, the American collection was now open.

I was misinformed. The entrances and stairs to the American galleries were still roped off. The rooms where usually hang the seascapes of Winslow Homer, the portraits of John Singer Sargent, and the American impressionists were closed.  So were the galleries of American genre paintings, the Ash Can school, and the Hudson River landscapes. (I see now (January 2009) that the renovations to the American art galleries aren’t scheduled to be completed until early 2011.)

And so was the grand, old-fashioned picture gallery that has Emanuel Leutze’s enormous Washington Crossing the Delaware and as many other nineteenth-century paintings as they can cram from floor to ceiling. (Where could they have put the Leutze during renovations, I wondered? How did they possibly get it out? It’s over 20 feet wide!)

My disappointment was great, for I had my mind set on American art. But then I remembered the stacks. I couldn’t tell you how to find them there in the Met, except that they’re somewhere in the northwest corner, not far from the big Egyptian temple. They’re actually called the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art.

In the stacks, for quite a few years, the Met has kept, ostensibly for “study” purposes but more likely out of a sense of guilt for squirreling away so much interesting art away from the public, a good number of the American paintings in its collection that aren’t currently being exhibited in the American galleries. (Right: Childe Hassam’s lush Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain, 1918, which I saw in the stacks.) The stacks consists of rows and rows of tall glass cases with locked doors, behind which they’ve hung paintings as closely together as possible on pegboards.

The viewing conditions are terrible. The stacks are only about five feet apart, and the glare on the glass from the ceiling lights is dreadful.  In no sense are the pictures displayed to advantage, and they aren’t in any particular order. Still, the stacks are better than nothing, especially while the American galleries are closed.

I’d spent enough time in them in years past to know that they usually contain (a) inferior examples from well-known American painters, (b) paintings in poor condition, and (c) paintings from schools that are out of vogue. But last week, the stacks included quite a few of the Met’s best-known American paintings, works that ordinarily would be on display. (Above, and fighting the glare: “Zeke’s House – Zeke’s Shop,” by American impressionist Daniel Garber)

Practically all the Homers were there, from his Civil War pictures to his late marine paintings. So were the Sargents — familiar large portraits and medium-sized landscapes — but not Sargent’s notorious Madame X, which was being exhibited in a place of honor several blocks away at the other end of the Met among the 19th-century European paintings.  (Another Sargent and several paintings by Thomas Eakins, James McNeill Whistler, and William Chase Merritt were in the same gallery with Madame X among the Europeans.) So were eight Mary Cassatts and nearly a dozen impressionist paintings by Childe Hassam (to the right: Hassam’s Celia Thaxter’s Garden).

I found a number of my old favorites in the glass cases.  There was the triptych by Thomas Waterman Wood, A Bit of War History, a masterpiece of 19th-century genre painting, which shows a black man first as an escaped slave, then as a soldier in the Union army, then, after the war, as a disabled veteran.  There was Thomas Anschutz’s A Rose, a stylized portrait of a pensive, seated woman in a red dress.  There was Worthington Whittredge’s The Camp Meeting, an unusual scene of a 19th-century revival meeting held on the shores of a river (the picture is dated 1874); an evangelist on a platform among the trees is speaking to a large crowd.  Himself a veteran of many camp meeting scenes, Emsworth felt right at home in Whittredge’s picture.

Not to mention the American impressionists! I wouldn’t have guessed the Met had so many Hassams, although most of them were probably up when the Met hosted the Childe Hassam retrospective several years ago. Down at the bottom of one of stacks, side by side, were two exceptionally fine Willard Metcalf paintings of wonderfully familiar (to Emsworth) scenes from upstate New York. (The Thawing Pool is to the right; The North Country is at the top of this post.) High up in another stack was Edmund C. Tarbell’s Across the Room, an 1889 painting that amuses me because of the way Tarbell imitated Edgar Degas in putting everything in one corner of a canvas and painting large expanses of floor. (Degas’s Dancers Practicing at the Bar, just below, is also at the Met.) Then there came a small surprise: an Ernest Lawson painting titled Harlem River that looked nearly identical to one of the finest Lawsons in the Phillips Collection. (See Emsworth’s comments on this and other Lawsons from the Phillips in this post.) Two other Lawsons in the stacks were not, I thought, his best.

I had never seen so many people in the stacks. I think probably most of them had wandered in by accident while searching for Homer’s The Gulf Stream or perhaps Frederick Church’s The Heart of the Andes. (I ran across the Church painting a little later elsewhere in the Met, in the middle of the Lehman Collection, as part of a modest, unadvertised exhibit of some of the Met’s large Hudson River School paintings.) I noticed a few empty spaces in the stacks, and as I continued to putter through through them, people from the curatorial staff arrived to unlock the glass doors and take a few paintings away. That looked promising; perhaps the re-opening of the American galleries was imminent.

UPDATE: In its description of the modest exhibit of large Hudson River School paintings, the Met’s website says that the museum’s “major reordering and upgrading of the American Wing paintings galleries” is scheduled for completion in early 2011. Two years away! Bah!

Ten pictures you shouldn’t miss at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

In Philadelphia on business last week, this art museum junkie was able to spend a pleasant afternoon at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where he found the usual tourists posing for souvenir photos at the top of the famous steps in triumphal “Rocky” poses. Unfortunately for the photos, most of this fine building is temporarily covered with scaffolding (even more than in this 2007 shot).

Inside, the collection is as rewarding as ever, but can’t be seen all in a day. If you have a chance to visit, Emsworth offers a modest list of ten pictures at this museum that he wouldn’t want his friends to miss.

1. Interior (Edgar Degas). Never mind the famous paintings of ballet rehearsals and nudes getting into their baths — this melodramatic 1868 painting is the Degas that appeals to me most. There’s a story here, but what is it?

The room, with its old-fashioned wallpaper, looks like a set from a play. The painting has been subtitled The Rape, as if the impassive man has just taken from the unfortunate, half-dressed woman something she can never get back. Is this a pictoral re-telling of the story of Amnon (son of King David), who tricked and raped his half-sister Tamar? “Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her.” 2 Samuel 13:15 (KJV). But what to make of the oddly lit jewelry box on the table in the middle of the room?

2. Rhetoricians at a Window (Jan Steen). Even without a Rembrandt or a Vermeer, the collection of Dutch and Flemish old masters at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is outstanding. It includes at least half a dozen marvelous genre paintings by the Dutchman Jan Steen, of which Rhetoricians at a Window, painted in 1661, is my favorite by an eyelash. Most of these portray working-class citizens in everyday activities, although one illustrates the Exodus scene of Moses striking the rock in anger to get water for the Israelites.

3. A Temperance Meeting (Homer). But Dutch genre paintings have nothing on American genre paintings. The Dutch peasant with the cup in Steen’s painting isn’t drinking milk, but the American farmboy in Winslow Homer’s scene, painted in 1874, is.

4. Christ Bearing the Cross (Murillo). The Gospel of John tells us that, after his trial, Jesus was forced to carry his own cross to Calvary, where he was to be executed by crucifixion. In this large picture by the great Spanish master Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Jesus meets his mother Mary and kneels to rest, with his cross on his shoulder. Mary holds out her hands as if to ask Jesus whether he truly must give up his life, a conversation she surely had with her son long before his arrest at Passover. Jesus confirms his mission with an expressive look.

Murillo’s picture is not a literal portrayal of the scene on the road to Calvary, because Jesus was guarded and whipped along by His tormentors on his way to Calvary, and it seems unlikely that they left Him alone for a private moment with His mother. Its meaning is, I think, figurative. Jesus surely knew long before his arrest that He had been sent to yield up His life as a sacrifice for the sins of mankind, and in a real sense He was carrying the cross throughout the years of His ministry. None of the many works of art with Christian themes in the Philadelphia Museum of Art will speak more movingly to believers than this 1665 picture.

5. Pont Neuf, Afternoon Sunshine (Pissarro). The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a spectacular collection of French impressionist paintings, but the sheer pleasure afforded by this heavily textured view of the most famous of the Paris bridges that cross the Seine is unmatched. Every part of this 1901 painting, from the colorful wagons and figures on the bridge to the fantastical greens and mauves of the river itself, is a sensual treat. To my great disappointment, it was not on the gallery walls during my mid-July 2008 visit.

6. Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (Duchamp). This cubist painting made a stir when it was first exhibited nearly a century ago (in 1914), but it’s not at all salacious. In fact, it’s difficult to find the nude subject of this monochromatic painting at all, let alone identify any particular parts of her anatomy. Nude Descending a Staircase may be the best-known cubist painting in the world. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has an excellent collection of other cubist works, especially by Picasso, Leger, and Juan Gris.

The museum has devoted an entire gallery to Marcel Duchamp. What a sad case study is his career! Some early paintings by Duchamp in the gallery, in what might be considered a post-impressionist style, show his exceptional talent. These include, for example, a fine portrait of his father. But Duchamp was caught up in the rapidly changing artistic and intellectual movements of the day. First, in a cubist phase, as represented by Nude Descending a Staircase, he abandoned representational art. Then, perhaps finding that celebrity and notoriety suited him more than artistic achievement, Duchamp abandoned his discipline altogether. He gave up painting, bought a bicycle wheel, mounted it on a pedestal, and announced that it was art.

Gratified with the attention, Duchamp repeated the trick over the years with a urinal, a comb, and other objects, a number of which are exhibited in this gallery. Remarkably, people took these stunts seriously; apparently some still do. The gallery chronicles Duchamp’s fall. The visitor will marvel at a century of public gullibility.

7. William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuykill River (Thomas Eakins). In the shadows, the famous sculptor chips away at his masterpiece. Neither Rush nor the elderly chaperone look at the nude model, who holds a box on her shoulder to help hold her pose. The model’s clothing, laid on a chair, is by far the brightest part of the painting.

8. The Large Bathers (Cezanne). It’s the picture that’s large (83 by 93 inches), not the bathers. Cezanne painted three versions of The Large Bathers, one in the London’s National Gallery, one at the Barnes Foundation, in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion, and this 1906 work, which is the finest of the three.

Paul Cezanne’s masterpiece can be seen 50 yards away down the long gallery lined with impressionist masterpieces that leads to the circular fountain court gallery.

9. The Rialto (Sargent). If Emsworth ever visits Venice, it will be because of John Singer Sargent’s evocative paintings of scenes from that city.

Visitors to the Philadelphia museum who want to see all the Sargents are led a merry chase. The curators have hung The Rialto among the works of late 19th-century European, presumably for no other reason than that it is a European scene. Portrait of Lady Eden is in the same gallery, presumably because the subject was British. But other Sargent paintings, including several fine portraits and a strikingly modern late landscape, are found among the works of his fellow Americans.

10. Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg (Matisse). In 1914, while Picasso and Braque were painting the same Cubist painting over and over again, Henri Matisse was using art’s new-found freedom to paint this unique portrait. As an afficionado, Emsworth was frustrated no end to find on his recent visit to Philadelphia (July 2008) that hardly anything by Matisse was on the walls.

These are not necessarily the finest or the most famous paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I have not forgotten Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Rubens’s Prometheus Unbound, Renoir’s Large Bathers, Eakins’s The Gross Clinic, or Monet’s Japanese Footbridge and Lily Pool. But you’d see them anyway.