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

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

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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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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SIFG_110609_080.JPG: Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Little Blue Girl James McNeill Whister, 1894-1903 Whistler described this female nude as "a figure to, in a way, hint at 'Spring.'" It held a special significance for both the artist and for Charles Lang Freer, who had commissioned -- and paid for -- the work in 1894 but did not take possession of it until the artist's death in 1903. When Whistler's wife Beatrix lay dying of cancer in 1896, the expatriate wrote to his patron in Detroit that he had continued to work on the painting, in part to ease his grief. "I write to you many letters on your canvas," he explained to Freer, and indeed, the multiple layers of paint around the model's face convey Whistler's almost obsessive reworking of the surface. Whistler designed and painted the frame to harmonize with both the figure and the checkerboard pattern of the rug on which she stands. Whistler thought the frame was an important element in the overall design of a work of art. Here, he signed it with his trademark butterfly, ensuring that the frame and image would be understood as two parts of a whole.
2. SIFG_110609_094.JPG: Arrangement in Black: Portrait of FR Leyland James McNeill Whistler, 1870-73 Charles Freer, who purchased the Peacock Room in 1904, did not see this painting of the room's first owner, Frederick Leyland, until 1905, though he confessed that hearing a fellow collector describe it "makes my blood tingle." It depicts Whistler's important early patron in black evening dress, accented with the ruffled shirt-front for which Leyland was renowned. The dramatic palette and tall, narrow format are derived from the Spanish court painter Vel�squez, whose works Whistler had seen some years earlier, at an exhibition in Manchester. Although artist and patron would suffer a falling out over Whistler's decoration of the Peacock Room, Whistler was on intimate terms with the Leyland family in the early 1870s, and Frederick Leyland, who endured long sessions posing for this work, was pleased to be painted in the style of seventeenth-century royalty. Many of Whistler's full-length portraits are contemporaneous with the Nocturnes, with which they share many formal qualities, including a reduced, darkened palette and soft, almost vaporous surfaces. As with the Nocturnes, Whistler gave these portraits musical titles intended to emphasize color and composition rather than the individuality of the sitter. Even so, the personalities depicted are rarely effaced by their artistic handling, and it was surely the dynamic tension between artistic selection and human presence that attracted Freer to this work.
3. SIFG_110609_102.JPG: Arrangement in White and Black James McNeill Whistler, ca 1876 Maud Franklin, the subject of this painting, began posing for Whistler when she was sixteen years old. She eventually became his mistress and bore at least two of their children, who were raised by foster parents. A painter in her own right, Franklin exhibited works in the 1880s under her mother's name, Clifton Lin, and used the title Mrs. Whistler until 1888, when Beatrix Godwin and Whistler married. The self-confident pose she strikes in this portrait probably accounts for the title attached to it, L'Americaine.
4. SIFG_110609_127.JPG: Ancient Chinese Bronzes Ancient Chinese Bronzes Chinese civilization made great advances as it emerged from the Neolithic period and entered the Bronze Age. One factor in this change was the ability to locate and extract natural deposits of copper and tin for making bronze. Foundries capable of heating the ores to high enough temperatures for mixing and casting metal were established in northern areas of China around 1700 BCE. One of the largest and most impressive early foundries was at Anyang, the capital of the late Shang dynasty from about 1300 to 1050 BCE. Located in northeastern Henan province, Anyang has been under almost constant archaeological excavation since 1928. The Bronze Age site encompassed a major settlement with huge tombs linked to twelve kings. All of these royal burials were looted centuries ago, but some of the undisturbed aristocratic tombs have yielded bronzes of astounding quality, including many of the ritual containers now in the Freer Gallery of Art. With the establishment of foundries, northern cultures in China reaped the benefits of the Bronze Age earlier than peoples to the south. Tremendous social and political change resulted as technologically advanced cultures grew in wealth and power. Tools and weapons made of durable bronze replaced stone implements and revolutionized agriculture and warfare. Trade expanded to distant areas. Rituals for honoring ancestors by equipping tombs and offering symbolic banquets, replete with highly decorated cast bronze containers for wine and rice, became more elaborate. Writing systems developed from single symbols that represent a family or clan to complex pictographs that record significant moments in Chinese history in lengthy inscriptions. These cultural and artistic advancements, historic episodes, and more are conveyed in these exceptional bronzes.
5. SIFG_110609_149.JPG: Animals in Bronze Whether imaginary or real, animals are a recurring decorative element of ancient Chinese bronzes. One of the more enduring animal forms is the taotie, a stylized monster motif with symmetrically arranged eyes, ears, horns, snout, and jaw. Despite its one face, it usually has two bodies that end in coiled tails. Early in the Bronze Age, the creature was depicted as a linear design with central eyes and spiraling extensions that are easily lost in the surrounding decoration. Over the centuries its abstracted features were presented in high relief to distinguish them from background designs. As the Shang dynasty progressed, the contour of the motif was eliminated entirely and isolated features of the taotie were raised above the patterned ground. Dragons provided a bountiful source of inspiration for the artistic imagination. With their horns and coiling tails, dragons are easily recognizable when combined with other mythical creatures and real animals or even when given somewhat human features. Fish, tigers, and birds -- possibly representing all creatures of the sea, land, and air -- frequently appear on vessels produced in southern China. Artists in the north, aware of these more naturalistic representations of living animals, adapted their preference for compartmentalized designs to create fanciful ewers that seem to combine the shapes of various creatures. An amalgam of actual and mythical animals, they continue to intrigue and delight viewers millennia later.
6. SIFG_110609_171.JPG: Bronze Age Casting The ability to make bronze tools, weapons, and ritual vessels was such a significant advancement in world civilization that it lends its name to an entire era: the Bronze Age. The skill and resources needed to fabricate bronze were in place in ancient China by 1700 BCE, over a thousand years later than in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. The earliest Chinese bronze artifacts have been traced to the Erlitou culture in Henan province. Their discovery confirms foundries for smelting and casting metal were active in northern China between 1300 and 900 BCE, a highpoint of early Chinese casting. Making bronze requires two things: copper and tin ores, sometimes mixed with lead; and intense heat for refining and casting. Chinese founders made their metal objects using clay for both models and removable section molds. (This differs from the Mediterranean and European practice of casting objects using wax-covered models.) After a desired vessel was fashioned from clay, it was covered with an additional layer of clay that, when dried, was carefully cut away in matching vertical sections (usually three or four) to create the casting molds. The original clay model was then shaved down for the interior core, and the mold sections were reassembled around it to make the outer walls. The space between the core and outer molds was then filled with molten bronze. In many cases, the joins between mold sections appear as raised ribs on the exterior of finished bronzes. After the bronze cooled, the clay molds were broken and removed, and the vessel was polished to take away flaws and any metal that had seeped into gaps between the mold sections.
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Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [(Smithsonian) Freer Gallery of Art] [Display ALL (Smithsonian) Freer Gallery of Art photos] [Museums (Art)]
2011 photos: Trips this year: Civil War Trust conferences (Savannah, GA, Chattanooga, TN), New Jersey over Memorial Day for my birthday (people never seem to visit New Jersey -- it's always just a pit stop on the way to New York. I thought I might as well spend a few days there. Despite some nice places, it still ended up a pit stop for me -- New York City was infinitely more interesting), my 6th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco). Ego strokes: Author photos that I took were used on two book jackets this year: Jason Emerson's book "The Dark Days of Abraham Lincoln's Widow As Revealed by Her Own Letters" and Dennis L. Noble's "The U.S. Coast Guard's War on Human Smuggling." I also had a photo of Jason Stelter published in the Washington Examiner and a picture of Miss DC, Ashley Boalch, published in the Washington Post. Equipment this year: I mostly used the Fuji S100fs camera as well as two Nikon models -- the D90 and the new D7000. Mostly a toy, I also purchased a Fuji Real 3-D W3 camera, to try out 3-D photographs. I found it interesting although I don't see any real use for 3-D stills now. Given that many of the photos from the 1860s were in 3-D (including some of the more famous Civil War shots), it's odd to see it coming back. Number of photos taken this year: just over 390,000.
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