Tag Archives: NGA

Imaging Paris: Charles Marville’s Photography Documented Baron Haussmann’s Transformation of the City of Light

By the end of the 1850s, Charles Marville had established a reputation as an accomplished and versatile photographer. From 1862, as official photographer for the city of Paris, he documented aspects of the radical modernization program that had been launched by Emperor Napoleon III and his chief urban planner, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. In this capacity, Marville photographed the city’s oldest quarters, and especially the narrow, winding streets slated for demolition. Even as he recorded the disappearance of Old Paris, Marville turned his camera on the new city that had begun to emerge. Continue reading






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Flaneur’s Gallery: Venus with a Mirror

When I first saw the painting at age 14, I learned how the experience of art could arouse me. Arouse is not a metaphor. Strolling through a museum with Ms. Modigliani is the most enchanting kind of foreplay on a rainy afternoon. At 14 I was amazed to think that Titian must have felt this way about Venus (and the artist’s model) when he painted her. He was approaching 70 then, and he kept the painting in his studio until the day he died. I have to smile now at callow youth and everything left to learn about the sensuality of old men.






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Audubon’s “American Flamingo” & “Snowy Heron”

The modest little heath hen drawn for a bank note made me think of John James Audubon’s grander bird portraits of the American Flamingo and Snowy Heron (Snowy egret). Both images come from individual plates from Birds of America in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The NGA identifies the artists as “Robert Havell after John James Audubon” and the media as “hand-colored etching and aquatint on Whatman paper plate.” The engravings were made in 1838 and 1835, respectively.






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Bonne fête Papa: A Flaneur’s Gallery

Paul Cézanne. The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Événement”. 1866. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. When I stood before this painting last month at the NGA, it happened to be the day that would have been my father’s … Continue reading






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Flaneur’s Gallery: Van Gogh’s Roses

Vincent van Gogh. Roses. 1890. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Roses was painted shortly before Van Gogh’s release from the asylum at St.-Rémy. He felt he was coming to terms with his illness—and himself. In this healing process, painting … Continue reading






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