A baby’s first experience with fine art at the Chrysler Museum of Art

Nearly five months old, the little guy was excited to see his first Winslow Homer at the Chrysler Museum of Art

Last weekend found us visiting our fine new grandson and his parents in their new home in Hampton, Virginia (a ten-hour drive from Rochester).  The little fellow was a newborn no longer and needed to be introduced to high culture, and we were anxious to visit the Chrysler Museum of Art, in nearby Norfolk — we’d never been.  So off we all went. The little guy seemed as tickled with the colorful stuff on the museum walls as his grandfather was.

Frankly, the Chrysler Museum of Art might not be the best art museum for a neophyte to visit. It has no Rembrandt, van Gogh, Cezanne, or Picasso, and none of the paintings you see on art prints and posters.  Its best-known piece is probably Gauguin’s “The Loss of Innocence,” which uses pretty much the same color scheme as our grandson’s onesies and blankets.  (We blushed, at a loss for words, when the intellectually curious boy, with a questioning look, mutely demanded an explanation of the picture’s symbolism.)  Nevertheless, with only a few exceptions (disappointing pieces by Corot and Monet), the overall quality of the works at the Chrysler, from the Old Masters to the modern masters, seemed very high.  We judge that, in assembling this collection, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. opted for first-rate works by second-tier artists rather than second-rate works by the most popular artists.

New museums usually mean pleasant surprises.  The one we enjoyed most was a large, wide 1868 canvas by Gustave Doré entitled “The Neophyte (First Experience of the Monastery),” a witty portrait of a terrified young monk sitting with a row of grubby older monks, clearly wondering what possessed him to take orders.  We had known Doré only as the painter of landscapes like the dramatic “The Scottish Highlands” at the Toledo Museum of Art, which is a favorite of ours. Mr. Chrysler deserves credit for snapping up this Doré masterpiece instead of throwing away his money on a mediocre Picasso.

And we are always delighted to stumble across anything by James Tissot, a Paris-trained Frenchman who didn’t follow friends like Degas, Manet, and Whistler into impressionism, but instead found his niche in the art market painting fashionably dressed women and their consorts in social settings. The Chrysler’s “The Artists’ Wives” is Tissot at his best.

There must have been a period of time in the last century when art collectors could snap up pontillistic paintings by the contemporaries of Georges Seurat at reasonable prices. (Pontillism is a technique in which a canvas is covered, not with brushstrokes of paint, but with hundreds of small dots of paint; the viewers’ eyes blend the colors.) Like the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which we visited several years ago, the Chrysler Museum has a modest group of works in the pontillistic vein. We were especially attracted to one by Maximilien Luce, called “The Footbath,” that showed the influence of Millet. It might well have illustrated a scene from Zola’s L’Assommoir, a late-19th-century novel about lower-class Parisians in desperate poverty that we had just read.

This American art lover’s trip to Norfolk gave him a chance to see less familiar but nevertheless worthy pieces by Winslow Homer, Frederick Carl Frieseke, Childe Hassam (the Chrysler exhibits his masterpiece “At the Florist” in the same gallery as the European impressionsts), John Henry Twachtman, Reginald Marsh (an especially risque nightclub scene), and Richard Diebenkorn. But the museum’s strength is in European art, which covers 600 years and (besides the paintings already mentioned) includes first-rate works by Veronese, Jan Gossaert, François Boucher, Pissarro, and Matisse (both works by these last two artists were out on loan when we visited; we saw the Pissarro in a fine exhibit at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts last fall).

One thing more about the museum in Indianapolis: when we were there with the new baby’s daddy several years ago, we were amused to find that a Homer (“The Boat Builders”) prominently featured in the museum’s promotional materials was in fact one of the smallest Homer oil paintings we’d ever seen (about 7 x 14 inches). But the Chrysler can top that. Besides an exceptionally fine 1882 impressionist double portrait by Renoir (see just above), the Chrysler boasts what’s surely as small a Renoir oil painting as you’ll ever find, a 5 x 7 inch vignette-style painting called “Trees by the Edge of a River,” which the museum bought in 1989 after soliciting 20,000 contributions from members of the public. We’d be curious to know exactly what it cost.

Ten pictures you shouldn’t miss at the Clark Institute

Renoir was Sterling Clark's favorite artist. This 1897 self-portrait is at the Clark.

 

We were just back to one of our favorites, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, which is inconveniently located in the mountain wilderness of western Massachusetts, several hours from anywhere. Of course, getting there over winding roads along mountain streams with breathtaking views of the Berkshires is part of the attraction. 

But the art collection is worth the trip. In fact, we would dare to rank the Clark (as it now calls itself) among the dozen best art museums in the United States. If you care for the work of John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Renoir, especially, it’s absolutely indispensable. And its special exhibitions — more compact than those you might see at the Met or the MFA in Boston and often better as a result — are always memorable. That’s the case with this summer’s striking side-by-side Picasso/Degas exhibit.  

Here is a modest list of ten pictures at the Clark that we wouldn’t want friends who visited the Clark to miss:  

1. Sunset, Saco Bay (Winslow Homer). Much of the art in the Clark was originally collected by Sterling Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune.  He had his prejudices; he didn’t like modern art at all, so you won’t see anything at the Clark by Matisse, Kandinsky, or Picasso (except in this summer’s exhibit) — not even Cezanne. And he apparently didn’t think much of American art, either — except, fortunately, for Homer and Sargent.  

We first fell for this dazzling 1897 painting — our very favorite Homer, and he’s our favorite American artist — when it visited Rochester in 1988 as part of a marvelous traveling exhibition of Homer’s marine paintings. The scene is Saco Bay, on the southern coast of Maine, not far from Prout’s Neck, where Homer lived and worked towards the end of his life. The women, with their traps, remind you of the paintings of fisher folk that Homer did a couple of decades earlier in England.  

We missed seeing Sunset, Saco Bay on our July visit. It’s evidently out on loan somewhere.  

2. The Onions (Pierre-Auguste Renoir). Mr. Clark clearly loved the French impressionists best, and Renoir most of all.  When you think of Renoir you think of women in various states of dress and undress, but his still lifes are wonderful. The Onions is our favorite of the dozens of Renoirs, including several still lifes, at the Clark.  

3. Fumée d’Ambre Gris – Smoke of Ambergris (John Singer Sargent)  The ancient Egyptians burned ambergris (a kind of whale secretion) as incense, and evidently some Algerians still did when Sargent visited northern Africa in 1879.  In this 1880 painting, was this a priestess, or simply an upper-class woman seeking the intoxicating (and supposedly arousing) effects of the fumes?  There’s just no other Sargent painting like this large, dramatic study in whites. The Clark’s smaller Sargent pictures of Venice scenes are favorites of ours too. 

4. Undertow (Winslow Homer). Did one of these unfortunate women perish trying to save the other? The lifeguards seem philosophical, as if reminding themselves that they did their best to warn swimmers about the dangerous undertow. The simple composition of this 1886 Homer masterpiece reminds us of Poussin’s paintings of classical scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 

5. The Snake Charmer (Jean-Léon Gérôme).  Besides Renoir and Homer, Mr. Clark’s special interests included the European academic painters of the late 19th century, who could get away with frankly sensual pictures.  Could Gerome have actually witnessed titillating private performances like this in the Middle East, with a nude, snake-entwined youth performing to the music of an exotic flute for half-drugged men with, shall we say, specialized tastes? 

6. The River Oise near Pontoise (Camille Pissarro). Sometimes we like Pissarro’s early paintings best, with their willfully flat areas of color (usually muted like the greens and blues in this one); sometimes we lean to his more heavily textured late pictures. This 1873 painting records a moment of change: the near riverbank still probably looks as it had for hundreds of years, while the factories and smokestacks have already transformed the far bank forever. 

7. Farm in the Landes (Pierre Étienne Théodore Rousseau). One of the pleasures of returning to any familiar museum is seeing what’s new. At the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, which we also visited on our recent New England jaunt, our hearts were gladdened to see a lovely, recently-donated, garden-and-river painting by Willard Metcalf.  

In Williamstown, what was new was this large, vivid rural scene by Theodore Rousseau.  A little internet research discloses that the Clark apparently bought it at auction in 2009 for something in excess of $1 million. We think it’ll be the centerpiece of what was already a remarkably fine group of works by the Barbizon painters, including Corot, Troyon, and Millet. 

8. Girl with Sleeping Dog (Renoir). We feel sorry for the art-loving French.  What must they think when they come to America, make the rounds of art museums from Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Washington and out to Chicago, and realize that we’ve got a lot more of the French Impressionists than they do?    

But the French won’t really feel the enormity of what’s they’ve lost without coming to Williamstown, Mass.  We judge there are more Renoirs in the Clark than anywhere else in America except the Barnes Foundation and the Met — in fact, probably more than in any European museum besides the Musée d’Orsay.  Girl with Sleeping Cat is perhaps the best-known Renoir at the Clark.  

9. Apples and Grapes in a Basket (Alfred Sisley). Monet, Renoir, and Degas may be more popular, but our tastes in French impressionism tilt toward Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, both of whom are generously represented at the Clark. This Sisley is special, a still life instead of his usual landscapes.  

10. Hunting for Eggs (Homer 1874). Yes, this is the third Homer on this short list, but it’s a watercolor, and it’s part of possibly the best collection of Homer watercolors anywhere (those at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Met are worthy rivals). The group includes gentle genre pictures like this one as well as Adirondack lake and stream scenes (you’ve got to see the jumping trout).  

We didn’t see any of the Homer watercolors this summer; for conservation reasons they aren’t exhibited very often. We watch the Clark’s website for them; they’re sure to be back on display one of these years. They’re worth driving a long ways to see.

American art in Canajoharie: the Arkell Museum

Of all the art museums we visit, the Canajoharie Art Museum is the most unlikely. There’s not much to it, and it’s in the middle of nowhere (about half an hour west of Albany).

What attracts us to this upstate New York museum is a small but very creditable collection of American paintings from about 1860 to 1940: American impressionists, Ashcan artists, and regionalists. And anyone who cares for Winslow Homer at all must go to Canajoharie.

The Homers at the Arkell Museum include "Watching the Breakers"

This was the first time we’d been back since the museum got a shiny new addition a year or two ago. The addition seems to allow for a little more gallery space.  The museum seems to have a new name, too — but we’re not quite sure what it is. The sign over the post in front still says “Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery” (see above), but a big sign on the side of the building now also says “Arkell Museum” in large letters, with “Canajoharie Library” getting second billing. Its website now calls it “The Arkell Museum at Canajoharie,” which for some reason reminds us of the ridiculously named Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Theodore Robinson's "Josephine in the Garden" was painted in 1890 in Monet's garden in Giverny, France -- one of our favorites in the Arkell Museum collection.

If the name “Canajoharie” seems vaguely familiar, it could be because you’ve noticed it on the signs for New York State Thruway Exit 29. You pass it on your way to Albany from Rochester or Syracuse. If you know where to look, you can see the museum building from the Thruway itself.

The location of the museum still leaves a lot to be desired. It shares its facility with the local library, and the same lady who sells you a $7 ticket to the museum also checks out library books. The museum isn’t located in a semi-glamorous tourist destination like the Feminore Art Museum in Cooperstown, about 40 miles west, or in an upscale residential neighborhood like the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, a hundred miles east. Instead, it’s right across the street from a baby-food factory. (The Arkell family, founders of the museum, owned the Beech-Nut company, makers of chewing gum and baby food.)  The town of Canajoharie itself is the sort of slowly decaying upstate New York community that Richard Russo sets his novels in (like Empire Falls).

Edmund Tarbell: "Girl Crocheting"

Still, it’s easy to get to — only about five blocks from the Thruway exit. A visit to the Canajoharie Art Museum is a pleasant and convenient diversion if you’re on a road trip, as we were a week and half ago.

The group of American impressionists at the Arkell Museum is especially rewarding. By a nose, our favorite was a 1904 painting by Edmund Tarbell called “Girl Crocheting,” a gentle, golden interior with hints of Vermeer and de Hooch. We think it’s as fine a Tarbell as we’ve seen. The wife of our bosom, on the other hand, would have chosen Childe Hassam’s “Provincetown” (shown here) a richly worked canvas that we agreed was among his finest. The collection also includes impressionist paintings by Willard Metcalf, Edward Redfield, Edward Lawson, John Twachtman, and William Glackens. We were taken with a remarkably bright snow scene by Walter Launt Palmer, a new artist to us. We couldn’t find an image of his Arkell Museum painting, but you can get an idea of its light effects from a couple of his winter scenes in this excellent blog post about Palmer by Matthew D. Innis.

The Ashcan painter John Sloan is one of our very favorite American artists, and our heart was gladdened to see once again his lively 1917 painting “Gloucester Trolley.”  Remarkably, the Arkell Museum has two paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, both portraits from the 1920s (this one is “New England Postmaster,” painted in 1924). Although we are devoted to Benton, we liked even better a delightful painting by a lesser-known regionalist, Ogden Pleissner, whose works we have not often seen in museums. Pleissner’s 1939 painting “Circus Comes to Rawlius, Wyoming” (unfortunately we couldn’t find an image) shows the organized chaos of a traveling circus getting ready for a show — a circus tent, brightly colored caravans, and the rear ends of several elephants.

But what makes the Arkell Museum special is its collection of Winslow Homer. The museum has some six or seven Homer oil paintings (they weren’t all on display ten days ago), including the late marine shown toward the top of this post, and more than a dozen Homer watercolors.

Homer's "Home, Sweet Home," in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

As might be expected, the watercolors are exhibited sparingly, only once every several years. We’ve seen them before, but missed them during our recent visit; we suppose the museum’s website will announce when they’ll be up again.  Of the Homer oil paintings, our favorite here is “Punishment for Intoxication,” which we think is one of the best of Homer’s dozen or so Civil War paintings. It’s a Union Army camp scene; a soldier, holding a stick instead of his rifle, is standing in disgrace on a box, while another soldier paces nearby. We couldn’t find an image of “Punishment for Intoxication,” but it’s as richly detailed, and has the same atmosphere, as Homer’s poignant “Home, Sweet Home,” in the National Gallery of Art.

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 the Emsworth 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 a favorite. 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.

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. [Update: I see now (January 2009) that the renovations to the American art galleries aren't scheduled to be completed until early 2011.] [Further update from July 2011: they still aren't done. We're apparently looking at late 2012.]

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 the stacks 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! We 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!