BGuthrie Photos: NY -- NYC -- Metropolitan Museum of Art -- American Wing

NY -- NYC -- Metropolitan Museum of Art -- American Wing:

Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.

Description of Pictures: I got the dates wrong. The American section still hadn't reopened.

Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon

underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.

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.

Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 18.218.38.125 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.

Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]

Share: Facebook Twitter Digg
[1] METAAM_110529_002.JPG	[2] METAAM_110529_006.JPG	[3] METAAM_110529_016.JPG
[4] METAAM_110529_020.JPG	[5] METAAM_110529_031.JPG	[6] METAAM_110529_036.JPG
[7] METAAM_110529_040.JPG	[8] METAAM_110529_050.JPG	[9] METAAM_110529_055.JPG
[10] METAAM_110529_061.JPG	[11] METAAM_110529_066.JPG	[12] METAAM_110529_077.JPG
[13] METAAM_110529_086.JPG	[14] METAAM_110529_092.JPG	[15] METAAM_110529_103.JPG
[16] METAAM_110529_106.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. METAAM_110529_006.JPG: View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm -- The Oxbow, 1836 Thomas Cole Long known as The Oxbow, this work is a masterpiece of American landscape painting, laden with possible interpretations. In the midst of painting The Course of Empire (New-York Historical Society), Cole mentioned, in a letter dated March 2, 1836, to his patron Luman Reed, that he was executing a large version of this subject expressly for exhibition and sale. The picture was shown at the National Academy of Design in 1836 as View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm. Cole's interest in the subject probably dates from his 1829–32 trip to Europe, during which he made an exact tracing of the view published in Basil Hall's Forty Etchings Made with the Camera Lucida in North America in 1827 and 1828. Hall criticized Americans' inattentiveness to their scenery, and Cole responded with a landscape that lauds the uniqueness of America by encompassing "a union of the picturesque, the sublime, and the magnificent." Although often ambivalent about the subjugation of the land, here the artist juxtaposes untamed wilderness and pastoral settlement to emphasize the possibilities of the national landscape, pointing to the future prospect of the American nation. Cole's unequivocal construction and composition of the scene, charged with moral significance, is reinforced by his depiction of himself in the middle distance, perched on a promontory painting the Oxbow. He is an American producing American art, in communion with American scenery. There are both sketchbook drawings with annotations and related oil sketches of this subject. Many other artists copied or imitated the painting. The so-called Father of the Hudson River School, Cole anticipated the "great picture" landscape phenomenon that blossomed with the work of his pupil Frederic Church. Indeed, a few of Cole's paintings were larger than any that Church ever painted, and one or two of his exhibitions prefigured the quasi-theatrical events mounted for the premiers of Church's and Alfred Bierstadt's monumental works (three of which are on view in this gallery). Even this large view from the well-known tourist spot of the early nineteenth century demonstrates Cole's ambitions as an artist and a showman. Exhibited in 1836 at the national Academy of Design, The Oxbow (named for the peculiar loop then made by the Connecticut River at Northampton) includes a portrait of the artist in the center foreground. Beneath the paint layer is a composition in graphite of one of the five pictures in The Course of Empire (1836; New York Historical Society), a pictorial narrative of the rise and fall of an ancient civilization. Cole exhibited the series in fall 1836 at the National Academy as a pay-for-admission spectacle that attracted several thousand people.
2. METAAM_110529_020.JPG: William Bradford An Arctic Summer: Boring through the Pack in Melville Bay, 1871 In 1861, the year Frederic Church exhibited his monumental Icebergs: The North (Dallas Museum of Fine Arts), the marine painter William Bradford made the first of eight expeditions to the Arctic. This picture, based on photographs and sketches made during his final trip, in 1869, shows the artist's steamer, Panther, plying its way through the summer ice along the upper coast of Greenland. Panther was among the numerous vessels, mostly British and American, searching for the Northwest Passage (or, as the ship spar at the left suggests, looking for one of the many parties lost during that quest). Bradford's paintings, photographs, and expedition accounts found a richer marker in London than in New York, and the artist settled in England for several years, selling his ambitious pictures to such nobles as Queen Victoria. An Arctic Summer returned to America in the 1970s.
3. METAAM_110529_031.JPG: The Valley of Wyoming, 1865 Jasper Francis Cropsey (American, 1823–1900) This large studio work was commissioned in 1864 by Milton Courtright (1810–1883), who was born and raised on his family's farm in the heart of the Wyoming Valley. In his account book, Cropsey recorded a payment of $125 from Courtright on August 4, 1864, and three additional payments in January, March, and May 1865, totaling $3,500. On August 8, Cropsey made at least two preparatory drawings of the site (now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). One of these served as the basis for the oil sketch for this painting. This large picture was shown at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1865. It retains the original frame and plaque with a poem written in 1809 by the Scottish Thomas Campbell. Cropsey was living and working in London when Frederic Church's Heart of the Andes was shown there in 1860. That year, he painted an eight-foot-wide canvas, Autumn -- On the Hudson River (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), which was lauded in the press during its exhibition in London. After his return to America in the midst of the Civil War, Cropsey produced the present canvas that Milton Courtright, the first president of the New York Elevated Railroad Company, who was raised in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania. The finely rendered landscape includes Courtright's house in the far distance. Finished during the final days of the war, Cropsey's image is more literal than George Inness's contemporaneous Peace and Plenty (also on view in this gallery), which idealizes the agrarian bounty promised by the war's end. The scene of a massacre of American colonists during the Revolution, Cropsey's valley looks to a future both pastoral and industrial, sheltered by a domelike disposition of clouds and anointed by providential rays of sunlight illuminating the scene as if through an oculus.
4. METAAM_110529_040.JPG: The Heart of the Andes, 1859 Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900) Fully ten feet in breadth and rich in botanical detail, The Heart of the Andes is Church's largest and most ambitious painting as well as the most popular in his time. It represents the culmination of two expeditions to Colombia and Ecuador in 1853 and 1857, inspired by the writings of the world-renowned naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Humboldt conceived the equatorial landscape of the New World as a kind of laboratory of the planet in which the range of climatic zones, from torrid to frigid, could be studied from the jungles at sea level to the perpetual snow of Andean mountains such as Chimborazo, in Ecuador, represented in Church's picture. Within its classical landscape format, the artist literally attempted to convey the variety of earthly life, most conspicuous in the lush foreground. At its three-week premier in 1859, The Heart of the Andes was housed in a huge windowlike frame and illuminated in a darkened room by concealed skylights. Twelve thousand people paid a quarter apiece to see it in New York, whence it toured Great Britain and seven other American cities until the eve of the Civil War.
5. METAAM_110529_086.JPG: The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, 1863 Albert Bierstadt (American, 1830–1902) This painting is the major work that resulted from the artist's first trip to the West. In spring 1859, he accompanied a government survey expedition, headed by Colonel Frederick W. Lander, to the Nebraska Territory. By summer, the party had reached the Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains in what is now Wyoming. Bierstadt dubbed the central mountain in the picture Lander's Peak following the colonel's death in the Civil War. This was one of a number of large works painted after Bierstadt's return from these travels. It was completed in 1863, exhibited to great acclaim, and purchased in 1865 for the then-astounding sum of $25,000 by James McHenry, an American living in London. Bierstadt later bought it back and gave or sold it to his brother Edward.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
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.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].