Gilbert Stuart at the Met
 

Has anyone seen the Gilbert Stuart Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? (I bet Marvin has)


Anyway, I am planning to drive up on Tuesday the 4th to see this. There is only a little more than a week left for this show. Anyone else interested in meeting there?

Garth

The Met has always seemed like Mecca to me. Since I currently live three thousand miles away, though, the most I can manage is to pray on my knees in that direction, five times a day. Wish I could join you -- enjoy the show!

Oh garth ye know me too well. I saw the exhibit when it first opened. Stuart was a real wheeler dealer who lived a checkered existence. The vast majority of his portraits were quite formulaic. Same pose, same lighting, same color, same bat channel.

The scariest part was the room where Stuart's Washington portraits were displayed. He had multiple portraits of only a few poses. It's very bizarre to see the subtle differences of the same exact pose. Some were really good and others were awful. But this was before reproduction and everyone wanted a portrait of #1 Pres.

However there was a portrait of Samuel Adams he did when Adams was ninety. It knocked my socks off. Different lighting and a true look into Adam's soul. I bought the catalogue just to have a record of the painting.

Living in NY is no picnic but there is no substitute for the accessibility to great art at the Met, the Frick, and the auction house previews. Everything I know about painting I learned at the Met.

I'll be in Atlanta this week, spreading the gospel including my slide show entitled "Everything I know about painting I learned at the Met."

Thanks Marvin for your candid insightful review. Now I really want to see this show. Good luck in Atlanta! Someday I'll have to scrape up an offering and attend one of your gospel tent revival meetings. In the mean time as a pilgrim I'll try to worshipfully learn more at the Met as I can pay the tolls and $35.00 parking.

Michelle: One thing that I am noticing about museum sites more lately is that the quality of their downloadable images is improving by leaps and bounds with the advent of high end digital captures. With the Met site in particular, they have an enlargement feature showing a detail of one-quarter of each painting at a time. What I have found is that by enlarging and downloading each four corners of the desired image, and reassembling the quadrants in Photoshop, a yield of a whole enlarged painting is created to file and keep for reference. It's a lot of work and certainly against the Met's intentions, but well worth it. That's my Secret of the Day!

Thanks,

Garth

Good tip, Garth. I had been enjoying the very large and exceptional high res images on the Rijksmuseum website for the past couple of years, but had been disappointed in the images on the Met's site. Sounds like they've upgraded things. I'll have to check it out.

Oh come all ye faithful!

Hi Garth,

I hope you enjoy your visit to the Met today (I'm jealous), assuming the roads are drivable! I got the visit the Met a month ago for the first time, and while I did see the Gilbert Stuart exhibit, I basically walked really fast through it. I was so blown away by everything else, particularly in the Lehman collection, and I didn't want to waste too much time in the Stuart exhibit (isn't that terrible?). It was really eerie though to see so many duplicates of the exact same portrait of George Washington. If only he could have lived in the age of giclees.

Holly

Thanks Holly,

Actually it turns out I will visit on Thursday rather than today (although roads are perfect today and may have a snow mix on Thursday). David Kassan may meet up. If anyone else wants to team up, fine.

Garth

Michelle, the Rijksmuseum has a fantastic state-of-the-art website. However on a Macintosh one has to surf this with Safari because Internet Explorer is useless. What fun!

Thanks,

Garth

Wish I could go, but I gotta work (gee, what a treat).

The Rubens drawing show is starting on the 15th, I will most likely be there on the 16th. I've been waiting for tis one for a while, hopefully not to be disappointed, which I doubt.