2010 Art Related Travels: NYC

As I stated in a previous post, in January I was quite fortunate to go visit my good friend Diane Feissel in Philadelphia.  While on that visit, we took a bus trip up to NYC to meet up with our other good friend and fabulous painter Sadie Valeri who was visiting the big apple from San Francisico.  We spent the entire day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Seeing amazing works of art with two amazing friends was such a great way to break in the New Year!  Here are just a few of some of the works that struck me that day.  Again, there is much more to see at the MET and every time I get back there, I seem to find more great works I hadn't previously discovered.

Eugene Delacroix, Madame Henri Francois Riesener, oil on canvas 1835

Camille Corot, Portrait of a Child, oil on wood, 1835

Camille Corot is considered more of a french landscape painter (see example below) yet here in a room filled with Corot's masterful landscapes, I was surprised to find two of his finest portraits.  It is said that he painted fewer than 50 portraits in his life time which were mostly of his family or close friends. 

Camille Corot, The Environs of Paris, oil on canvas, 1860

Charles Brague, Bashi-Bazouk, oil on canvas, 1875

Jules Breton, The Weeders, oil on canvas, 1860

I loved walking into the room that this painting is hanging in.  It shares the space with a few Jean Francois Millet's wonderful paintings of a similar time of day.  I am in awe of paintings with back light situations.  It has got to be one of the most difficult casts of light to paint.  According to the placard hanging next to The Weeders, in his autobiography, Breton states that one evening he came across this twighlights scene of peasants pulling up "thistles and weeds... their faces haloed by the pink transparency of their violet hoods, as if to venerate a fecundating star".