Frick Collection
On Saturday, I went to the Frick Collection (1 E70th Street, near the park). It's this gorgeous old mansion where Henry Clay Frick put his personal art collection. Every available surface is covered with art, plus there are free-standing statues. It's smaller than a regular museum - it was house, if a big one - but all the art is good. You know how sometimes you go to some museums and there's a whole room with nothing in it but a toilet and a sign declaring that it (the toilet, not the sign) is Meaningful Art? There's none of that here. Henry Clay Frick had good taste. (Or, possibly, 'modern art' meant something different in 1900.) They said that almost half the stuff is from his original collection - the directors don't replace pieces often.
One of the unique things about this collection is that it's mostly "happy" art, like it would be pleasant to have hanging over your dinner table. (My dad once bought a painting depicting a battle scene that somehow involved bleeding horses, and insisted on putting it in the dining room. Eating steak became much more difficult with the painting there. Eventually my mother relegated the painting to the basement.) One room has a lot of landscapes and portraits of very serious people - but in the middle of that is Jean-Baptiste Greuze's "The Wool Winder", which is of a girl trying to wind up a ball of yarn, except a kitten is tugging on the loose ends. That's my favorite. The kitten looks so playful, and there's a remarkable amount of detail that brings the painting to life.
There's also a self-portrait by Rembrandt. And that got me thinking - how did artists do self portraits back then? Did they even have mirrors in the 1600s? I guess they probably did. But still, it seems hard to hold a pose and paint it at the same time. So maybe he was guessing about what he looked like, or painting the picture to be the way he wanted to look.
Some of the artists did really clever things with light. In The Education of the Virgin, the candlelight casts sharp light on one subject but a softer, diffused light on the other subject. But it all looks really accurate - better than 3D rendering programs do today.
My favorite portrait is the one of Thomas More. In most portraits, the person is usually looking off into space sort of blankly, or maybe smiling. In this one, Thomas More has this profound look of resignation, like there's a really good baseball game on but somebody has told him he has to sit right there until the painting is finished, and he's tried very hard to argue his way out of it, but finally given up.
This is a fabulous collection all around, and the century-old mansion is a great comfy setting for it.
One of the unique things about this collection is that it's mostly "happy" art, like it would be pleasant to have hanging over your dinner table. (My dad once bought a painting depicting a battle scene that somehow involved bleeding horses, and insisted on putting it in the dining room. Eating steak became much more difficult with the painting there. Eventually my mother relegated the painting to the basement.) One room has a lot of landscapes and portraits of very serious people - but in the middle of that is Jean-Baptiste Greuze's "The Wool Winder", which is of a girl trying to wind up a ball of yarn, except a kitten is tugging on the loose ends. That's my favorite. The kitten looks so playful, and there's a remarkable amount of detail that brings the painting to life.
There's also a self-portrait by Rembrandt. And that got me thinking - how did artists do self portraits back then? Did they even have mirrors in the 1600s? I guess they probably did. But still, it seems hard to hold a pose and paint it at the same time. So maybe he was guessing about what he looked like, or painting the picture to be the way he wanted to look.
Some of the artists did really clever things with light. In The Education of the Virgin, the candlelight casts sharp light on one subject but a softer, diffused light on the other subject. But it all looks really accurate - better than 3D rendering programs do today.
My favorite portrait is the one of Thomas More. In most portraits, the person is usually looking off into space sort of blankly, or maybe smiling. In this one, Thomas More has this profound look of resignation, like there's a really good baseball game on but somebody has told him he has to sit right there until the painting is finished, and he's tried very hard to argue his way out of it, but finally given up.
This is a fabulous collection all around, and the century-old mansion is a great comfy setting for it.
posted by Lexi Baugher at 00:02
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