DC -- Natl Gallery of Art -- West Wing -- Paintings:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- 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: 18.116.85.72 -- 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]
|
[1]
 NGAP_131214_01.JPG
|
[2] NGAP_131214_08.JPG
|
[3] NGAP_131214_14.JPG
|
[4] NGAP_131214_17.JPG
|
[5] NGAP_131214_20.JPG
|
[6] NGAP_131214_24.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- NGAP_131214_01.JPG: Gerrit van Honthorst, The Concert:
Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656) has long been considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age. After training in Utrecht, he traveled to Italy around 1615, where he embraced the radical stylistic and thematic ideas of Caravaggio. The immediacy of Caravaggio's religious and genre scenes, which are characterized by dramatic gestures and pronounced contrasts of light and dark, inspired a generation of "Caravaggisti" throughout Europe. These artists generally worked directly from posed models, as Caravaggio did, and brought their scenes close to the picture plane to suggest that they were an extension of everyday experiences. Honthorst, in particular, painted with verve and assurance, utilizing bright colors and strong chiaroscuro effects, and his life-sized sensuous figures dressed in exotic costumes gave a bold presence to his images.
When Honthorst returned to Utrecht in 1620 he was already a famous artist, and he was feted in his native city. His enthusiastic embrace of Caravaggism and his international renown also had great appeal at the court of Prince Maurits of Nassau in The Hague. The Prince of Orange, as he was known, was consciously trying to broaden the reputation of the court by improving his residences, building gardens, presenting musical soirées, and acquiring paintings.
Honthorst's The Concert is first mentioned in a 1632 inventory of one of the Prince of Orange's palaces in The Hague. Although the painting may have been purchased by Maurits, it may also have been a diplomatic gift. Paintings were often given to the prince in appreciation for services rendered or in hopes of eliciting future favors. A possible source for such a diplomatic gift was the exiled king of Bohemia, Frederick I, who had moved to The Hague in 1621 with his wife, Elizabeth Stuart, after his Protestant troops were defeated by Catholic forces. Even in exile, the king and queen of Bohemia actively collected works of art and lived a sumptuous lifestyle with funds partially provided by the Prince of Orange. They were great admirers of Honthorst, and he eventually became their court artist.
Frederick and Elizabeth may have commissioned the painting and then presented it to the Prince of Orange in appreciation for his financial support. This hypothesis is based on the similarity between the concertmaster in Honthorst's painting and an illustration of Frederick playing ball in a contemporary manuscript depicting courtly life in The Hague.
The Concert was much more than a decorative element in a courtly setting. It also had an underlying political message. Harmony in society, as well as in music, exists when the guidance of its leader is followed. This adage would have been appropriate for either the Prince of Orange or King Frederick I of Bohemia.
Until recently, the influence of Caravaggio on the art of northern Europe had not been represented in the Gallery's otherwise rich collection of Dutch art. The acquisition in 2009 of Hendrick ter Brugghen's Bagpipe Player, 1624, was a first step in addressing this gap. Together with the Gallery's Italian, French, and Spanish Caravaggist paintings, the works by these two masters convey the enormous impact of Caravaggio's style throughout Europe in the 17th century.
- 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].
