BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Not Covered Elsewhere

DC -- Freer Gallery of Art -- Not Covered Elsewhere:

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[1] SIFG_040109_005.JPG	[2] SIFG_040109_006.JPG	[3] SIFG_040109_013.JPG	[4] SIFG_040109_019.JPG	[5] SIFG_040109_021.JPG	[6] SIFG_040109_029.JPG	[7] SIFG_040109_033.JPG	[8] SIFG_040109_061.JPG	[9] SIFG_040109_071.JPG	[10] SIFG_040109_085.JPG
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SIFG_040109_061.JPG: Kongo Yasha Japan, Kamakura period, 13th century Wood with color, gold, and gilt bronze ornaments This guardian deity of Buddhism was assimilated from Indian religion. Known in the Indian Sanskrit language as Vajrayaksha, he is represented by a head with three faces and by six arms that wield weapons and Buddhist symbols. These include the Wheel of the Buddhist Law in the upper left hand and a ritual bell with a handle in the form of a vajra, or thunderbolt, in the upper right hand. This sculpture is based on a larger image preserved in the Buddhist temple Toji, in Kyoto.
2. SIFG_040109_181.JPG: A Virgin 1892-93 by Abbott Handerson Thayer Oil on canvas Thayer began this group portrait of his children, Gladys, Mary, and Gerald, soon after the untimely death of their mother in 1891. He originally envisioned the central figure, Mary (who temporarily took charge of Gladys and Gerald), as Flora, the Greek goddess of flowers, but as the work progressed he decided to make her a Greek "Victory" figure instead, with clouds billowing behind her like wings. The model for Mary's dramatic stance was a famous Hellenistic sculpture in the Louvre, the Nike of Somathrace (second century BC), known as the Winged Victory. Thayer would have seen that magnificent sculpture while he was a student in Paris during the late 1870's, when it was reinstalled at the head of the grand staircase. A related inspiration was the Sherman Monument, by Thayer's friend the sculpture Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907). Commissioned in 1891 and unveiled in 1903 at the Grand Army Plaza, New York City, the monument features a powerfully winged female figure, also modeled on the Winged Victory, leading the commander of the Union army into battle. Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), founder of the Freer Gallery of Art, purchased Thayer's Virgin in 1893 and hung the painting above the landing in the stair hall of his Detroit residence where, like the Winged Victory in the Louvre, it could be admired from various vantage points. Freer acknowledged Thayer's visual allusion in 1910 by ordering a plaster cast of the Winged Victory to be displayed beside A Virgin in an exhibition at the University of Michigan, along with other important works of Asian and American art from his collection.
3. SIFG_040810_025.JPG: Bodhisattvas A bodhisattva is an enlightened being of great compassion who renounces personal salvation and remains in the world to help others attain the spiritual release of nirvana. Although subordinate to Buddha, some bodhisattvas are also worshipped independently. The most commonly revered bodhisattva in Chinese Buddhism is the Bodhisattva of Compassion (called Guanyin in Chinese and Avalokiteshvara in the Indian language Sanskrit.) Bodhisattvas are usually portrayed in jewel-bedecked princely attire. They often carry either a sacred text (sutra) that represents knowledge, or a lotus, a symbol of transcendental nature. In India, where Buddhism originated, bodhisattvas traditionally have been depicted as males. In China, early images of bodhisattvas were also portrayed as males, but artists gradually began to imbue some bodhisattvas, especially Guanyin, with feminine traits. In theory, however, a bodhisattva is without gender, having transcended the duality of male and female. In early Chinese Buddhist images, artists stressed the divine nature of a bodhisattva by reducing the physical body to an abstract pattern. By the seventh century, taste changed in favor of plump, gracefully supple figures that radiated human compassion and seemed easily approachable.
4. SIFG_040810_169.JPG: James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) [the painter, not the subject of the painting] The expatriate American artist James McNeill Whistler was born in Massachusetts, studied art in Paris from 1855 to 1859, and spent most of the rest of his life in London. As an art student, Whistler was strongly influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish art, and by the realism of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Whistler first achieved critical and commercial success as an etcher, producing meticulously drawn prints of working-class life in rural France and London. His earliest important oil paintings evidence Courbet's influence, featuring the commonplace subjects and vigorous brushwork characteristic of the older artist's work. One of the most successful of these is the frigid December scene "The Thames in Ice" (1860), which emphasizes the brooding hulk of a flat-bottomed collier being used to haul coal, fish, and other heavy goods to London. Whistler's art changed dramatically in the 1860's. Influenced by Greek sculpture, Asian porcelain, and Japanese prints, he rejected the idea that the success of an art object could be measured by its accuracy as a representation or the effectiveness with which it told a story or suggested a moral. Instead, he became convinced that an art object was best understood as an autonomous creation to be valued only for the success with which it organized color and line into a formally satisfying and therefore beautiful whole. Abandoning the idea that paintings should create the illusion of pictorial depth, he developed the flatter, more purely decorative style for which he is best known. This shift is evident in transitional works such as "Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony" (1864-70) but was not complete until the early 1870's when Whistler began to paint the moody night scenes and restrained portraits which made him famous.
5. SIFG_040810_180.JPG: "The Thames In Ice", 1860, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on canvas. Whistler moved to London in 1859, where he took lodgings near the river Thames. The Thames rarely froze, but was clogged with ice for much of the unusually harsh winter of 1860-61, Whistler apparently completed this painting in three days, working from the balcony of an inn located across the Thames from his rooms in Wapping. When Whistler exhibited the painting at the Royal Academy in 1862, a newspaper reviewer praised its "murky, mournful, gloomy feeling."
6. SIFG_040810_186.JPG: "Harmony in Green and Rose: The Music Room", 1860-61, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on canvas. Set in the London home of Whistler's brother-in-law Seymour Haden, this painting was originally titled "The Morning Call." The woman reflected in the mirror at the left is Whistler's half sister Deborah Haden. The seated girl is his niece Annie Haden. The standing woman, Miss Isabella Boott, was connected to the Haden family by marriage. Instead of trying to create a convincing illusion of three-dimensional space, Whistler adopted a color scheme and sharply angled perspective that emphasize the flatness of the picture plane.
7. SIFG_040810_200.JPG: "Vert et Or: La Raconteur (Green and Gold: The Storyteller)" ca 1896-1900, by James McNeill Whistler. Freer once wrote a friend, "I believe Whistler really was the most successful of all known painters of children." Most of Whistler's young subjects were the children of friends or relatives. But in the later 1890's, Whistler often took cab rides through poorer London neighborhoods looking for street children to paint. The subject of this painting was an Italian waif named Tom. The sweep of the boy's left hand and his crooked smile suggest a mischievous intelligence.
8. SIFG_040810_207.JPG: "Arrangement in Black: Portrait of F.R. Leyland," 1870-1873, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on canvas. The Liverpool shipping tycoon Frederick R. Leyland (1831-1892) was Whistler's most important patron from 1867 until 1876, when they quarreled over Whistler's decoration of the dining room in Leyland's London home. Whistler titled the room "The Peacock Room," and it is now permanently installed at the Freer. In this majestic painting, Whistler flatters Leyland by painting him in the style of a royal portrait by the Spanish court painter Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez (1599-1660).
9. SIFG_040810_213.JPG: "Green and Gold: The Little Green Cap," ca 1896-1901, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on canvas.
10. SIFG_040810_225.JPG: "Nocturne: Grey and Silver -- Chelsea Embankment, Winter," 1879, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on canvas. Whistler did not begin to title his paintings of night scenes "nocturnes" until 1872. In 1878, he explained that he had adopted this musical term in order "to indicate an artistic interest alone, divesting the picture of any outside anecdotal interest which might have been otherwise attached to it. A nocturne is an arrangement of fine form and color first. The picture is throughout a problem that I attempt to solve. I make use of any incident or object in nature, that will bring about this symmetrical result."
11. SIFG_040810_232.JPG: "Nocturne: Blue and Silver -- Bognor," 1871-76, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on canvas. Bognor is a fishing village in West Sussex, near Selsey Bill, to the west of Brighton. The author of an 1876 review was probably thinking of this painting when he noted that Whistler had recently completed a new "study" of "moonlight on the sea." It "presents a wide stretch of quiet water, with a few fishing-boats pushing out from the shore. A perfect stillness controls the scene, save where the tide, rippling in upon the sand, catches with its movement the white shine of the moon. One little wing-like cloud hovers above a sea of intensest blue, which seems to reflect and to contain the fairer tones of the star-lit blue sky." Freer thought that "Bognor" was one of Whistler's greatest nocturnes.
12. SIFG_040810_240.JPG: "Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso Bay," 1866/1874, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on canvas. Whistler began this painting in Valparaiso, Chile, where he witnessed a Spanish fleet attack the city. Whistler probably started the painting as a daylight scene, transforming it into a night scene when he reworked the canvas in 1874. The high horizon and the powerful diagonal of the wharf create an arrangement of forms that has no European precedent, but recalled the late landscapes of the Japanese painter Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858).
13. SIFG_040810_252.JPG: "Symphony in Green and Violet," ca 1868, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on canvas. In the late 1860's, Whistler set out to forge a new style of painting for himself. Influenced by both Japanese woodblock prints and ancient Greek sculpture, he began to paint friezelike arrangements of figures clothed in brightly colored, loosely flowing gowns. Whistler never completed any of these paintings, and the most important surviving records of his intentions are studies like "Symphony in Green and Violet." Although originally conceived as experiments in color and design, Whistler believed that these sketches were among his most important aesthetic achievements.
14. SIFG_040810_260.JPG: "Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony," 1864-1870, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on canvas. Whistler constructed this painting according to Japanese pictorial principles, with the floor of the balcony falling abruptly away from the figures, whose forms are cropped at the margin as an asymmetrical composition. A spray of azaleas floats across the foreground, and the rectangular cartouche carrying the artist's butterfly signature resembles a Japanese seal. Yet the setting is clearly European: English models dressed in Japanese costumes repose on the balcony of Whistler's London home, with the Thames and the factories of Battersea beyond them.
15. SIFG_040810_274.JPG: Shitenno (Guardian Figures), Japan, Kamakura period (1185-1333), wood with polychrome, gold and crystal. These images are the guardians of the four directions, arranged here to approximate the pattern in which they would have been placed within a temple sanctuary protecting one of more centralized Buddhist images. They were created and positioned to be viewed frontally as a logical and dynamic composition. The right and left figures, Jikoku-ten (east) and Zocho-ten (south), raise, respectively, their right and left arms to provide a visual frame for the ensemble. The left rear figure, Komoku-ten (west), holds a writing brush and sutra scroll, and to the rear right, Tamon-ten (north) holds a miniature stupa in one hand and a spear in the other. Each figure stands on a writhing demon, symbolizing dominance over any enemies of Buddhism. Based on varied devotional settings, the four guardian figures have been produced in many sizes, from more than double the size of a human, the diminutive forms seen here, to even smaller. These lithe, animated figures are excellent examples of a hyperrealistic style that came to prominence in Japanese Buddhist sculpture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
16. SIFG_040810_384.JPG: "Portrait of Charles Lang Freer," 1902, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on panel.
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