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Description of Pictures: A really big highlights tour group due in large part to publicity in the Washington Post. (Article below)
Get a closeup of the National Portrait Gallery during its Docent's Choice Tours
Friday, January 8, 2010
Museums can be overwhelming: They're crowded. They're big. And they're chock-full of stuff. Where do you even begin?
This weekend, begin with a tour of the National Portrait Gallery.
"If you like history and biography, this is the museum for you," said Liane Lunden, an extremely knowledgeable docent of 15 years. "My purpose," she continued, "is to whet your appetite [so you] become as enchanted with this place as I am."
The tour, called "Docent's Choice Tour," is more of a history lesson than an aesthetic one. We learned about Alexander Hamilton, Lunden's favorite historical figure. ("His life reads like an adventure story," she said.) We learned about Belva Ann Lockwood, a woman who twice ran for president in the 19th century. (She got 4,000 votes in 1884, Lunden told us.) We learned about Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 1852. (Her publisher thought she would sell 10,000 books the first year. She sold 300,000, Lunden said.)
Lunden encouraged everyone to take a second look at the paintings and try to figure out what they say about their subjects. Looking at a self-portrait of John Singleton Copley, an 18th-century American painter who spent time in England and Italy, Lunden thought he looked "heartsick. Maybe he wants to be back home." Of Cecilia Beaux's self-portrait, she noted, "She's part of the woodwork. . . . She's just a servant of her art." She compared Edgar Degas's portrait of Mary Cassatt with Cassatt's self-portrait, which depicts a younger, softer Cassatt. "Try to find the story behind the picture," Lunden said.
Upstairs, we saw a few presidents' portraits, including the famous George Washington by Gilbert Stuart and Alexander Gardner's April 10, 1865, photograph of Abraham Lincoln that is said to have foreshadowed ...More...
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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center -- Tour) directly related to this one:
[Display ALL photos on one page]:
2018_DC_SIPG_Tour_180609: DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center -- Tour: Garrett Peck (11 photos from 2018)
2015_DC_SIPG_Tour: DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center -- Tour: Garrett Peck (4 photos from 2015)
2014_DC_SIPG_Tour: DC -- Donald W. Reynolds Center -- Tour (10 photos from 2014)
2010 photos: My office at the main Commerce Department building closed in October and I was shifted out to the Bureau of the Census in Suitland Maryland. It's good to have a job of course but that killed being able to see basically any cultural events during the day. There's basically nothing of interest that you can see around the Census building.
Overnight trips this year:
Civil War Trust conferences (Lexington, KY and Nashville, TN), and
my 5th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including Los Angeles).
Equipment this year: I mostly used the Fuji S100fs until the third one broke and I started sending them back for repairs. Then I used either the Fuji S200EHX or the Nikon D90 until I got the S100fs ones repaired. At the end of the year I bought a Nikon D5000 but I returned it pretty quickly.
Number of photos taken this year: about 395,000..
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