August 29, 2009<\/p>\n
In my last blog, I mentioned how much I didn\u2019t like the Tate Modern.\u00a0 Conversely, but maybe not surprisingly, I LOVED the National Gallery.\u00a0 I was especially excited to see works by Monet, and loved \u201cThe Grand Canal, Venice\u201d in particular.\u00a0 Since Van Gogh is one of my favorite artists, I was also amazed to see \u201cSunflowers\u201d and \u201cA Wheatfield with Cypresses\u201d in person.\u00a0 We continued to wander through rooms containing paintings by Renoir, Picasso, and many artists that I did not recognize (I found some new favorites to look into…Camille Pissarro, for one, who painted \u201cPortrait of Felix Pissarro\u201d and \u201cThe Boulevard Montmartre at Night\u201d).\u00a0 I was impressed by the sheer size and detail in many of the paintings, as well as their incredible preservation.\u00a0 I always imagine paintings from so long ago to look old, but these looked as if they were painted yesterday.<\/p>\n
The overwhelming majority of the museum\u2019s earliest paintings focused either on mythology or the Virgin Mary\/Jesus, and it gave me an idea about just how important these topics were to past generations.\u00a0 Maddie and I discussed how Jesus is almost always interpreted as a tall, thin, fair complexioned man when in reality, he was probably short, squat, curly haired and dark in complexion based on his geographical location.\u00a0 We also thought that \u201cThe Virgin and Child before a Firescreen\u201d by a follower of Robert Campin looked almost modern due to how old fashioned it was.\u00a0 It seemed, to us, that art has come full circle in some ways. \u00a0\u00a0I was also surprised to stumble upon \u201cThe Birth of the Virgin\u201d by Master of the Osservanza, because I\u2019ve never thought or seen record of Mary\u2019s birth.\u00a0 The focus is almost always on the birth of the Christ child, and it was interesting to see another portion of the Biblical story that is entirely overlooked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
August 29, 2009 In my last blog, I mentioned how much I didn\u2019t like the Tate Modern.\u00a0 Conversely, but maybe not surprisingly, I LOVED the National Gallery.\u00a0 I was especially excited to see works by Monet, and loved \u201cThe Grand Canal, Venice\u201d in particular.\u00a0 Since Van Gogh is one of my favorite artists, I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[731],"tags":[12,994,910,997,996,861,995],"class_list":["post-1031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amy","tag-art","tag-monet","tag-national-gallery","tag-pissaro","tag-renoir","tag-tate-modern","tag-van-gogh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}