Existing comment:
Edna Barnes Salomon Room
Room 316
The New York Public Library's Salomon Room, which was recently refurbished and modernized as a Wi-Fi reading and study room, is home to some of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building's most important paintings. Many of these art works belonged to the families of James Lenox and John Jacob Astor, 19th-century philanthropists whose great private libraries became two of The New York Public Library's foundational collections. On view in the Salomon Room today are the works of a number of important British and American artists, including portraits by Reynolds, Raeburn, Romney, Trumbull, and Stuart. ...
Some Paintings of Special Note:
George Washington (by Rembrandt Peale), ca 1859 / ca 1850.
Peale is best known for his many paintings of George Washington, two of which hand in the Salomon Room.
The Man from New York (John Quinn) (by Augustus John), 1909.
The chief patron of the 1913 Armory Show, Quinn also acquired original literary manuscripts by such avant-garde writers as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, whose manuscript of The Waste Land is today one of the treasures of the Library's Berg Collection. Quinn's papers, including his voluminous correspondence with most of the great modernist writers and artists of the first two decades of the 20th century, are held by the Manuscripts and Archives Division.
Truman Capote (by James Whitney Fosburgh), 1971.
This portrait of Capote -- author of such 20th-century classics as Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood -- was the gift of the author's estate. Capote's literary archive is held in NYPL's Manuscripts and Archives Division.
The Blind Milton Dictating "Paradise Lost" to His Daughters (by Mihaly Munkacsy), 1877.
Munkacsy's masterpiece won a grand gold medal at the 1878 Paris Exposition. Unfortunately, the once jewel-like colors of the painting have dimmed owing to the artist's use of asphaltum (bitumen) paint, which darkens -- irreversibly -- with time.
John Jacob Astor IV (by Leon-Joseph-Florentin Bonnat), 1896:
A member of the celebrated Astor family -- which has played such an important part in the history of The New York Public Library -- John Jacob Astor IV was en route from his honeymoon in Europe after a second marriage in 1912 when he perished on board the ill-fated Titanic.
Kitty Fisher (by Sir Joshua Reynolds), ca 1764-65:
The famous actress Kitty Fisher was only in her twenties when she died tragically from an overdose of arsenic (like many women of her time, she had ingested small amounts of the poison to lighten her skin). Reynolds captured the notorious beauty in a moment of contemplation, her eyes demurely lowered and one arm cradling a dove. |