An Afternoon in an Art Gallery

I've had the pleasure of being able to visit some small art museums in some of my recent trips, and was struck with how much more satisfying these little gems are than some of their bigger, more famous counterparts.  (As a disclaimer, note that I claim no particular expertise or formal study of art or art history and so my knowledge is entirely what can be gleaned from museum visits and keeping one's eyes open in general.)  The Frick Collection in Manhattan is probably the most famous and the one actually loaded with world class masterpieces (the Holbeins and the Vermeers), but the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth all provide wonderfully unique perspectives into the art world, all of which I highly recommend.

  

But the biggest surprise was the discovery of the Frye Art Museum in Seattle.  I just  happened to hear about it in passing and am so happy to have spent a couple hours there.  The museum is in a modern building in Seattle's First Hill neighborhood.  Charles Frye made a fortune in meatpacking, collected a lot of European (particularly German) paintings, attempted to give his collection to the city but was rebuffed in some way by another collector's bounty which became the Seattle Art Museum, and so subsequently created this independent gallery.  The wonderful thing about museums like this that are rooted in a single individual's tastes is that you get a window into styles of art that you don't necessarily find in such concentration elsewhere.  The Fryes seemed to have a real passion for the 19th century pastoral, the romantic, the bucolic representation of people and settings that feels really old school compared to the impressionistic movement.

At first, the collection seemed to be perfectly charming portraits like this Shepherdess by Adolph Bouguereau.  My photos from my iPhone don't really do these works justice.  I'm not really familiar with Bouguereau but it seems he had quite a following before falling out of favor in the early 20th century because of the realism of his painting.

What was more interesting, though, was the large number of 19th Century German paintings that were in the collection.  Perhaps I just haven't been paying attention, but it seems like one rarely sees paintings from Germany in many museums.  A favorite painter of the Fryes seems to be Gabriel von Max.  Here is his Madonna and Child from 1905.  I know so little about art history that I am really reluctant to make any comment at all, but this portrait fascinates me in what it succeeds at and what it fails to do.  The mother seems so completely ordinary, which perhaps is the intent.  It seems that Dutch versions of this would have portrayed an intensity and reserved emotion; Italians would have given more grace and idealized beauty; French would have been more alluring.  This is just a young girl with a baby you might find shopping at Aldis.  I don't mean that despairingly, as this portrait has really grown on me.

Another German artist with whom I was completely unfamiliar was Heinrich von Zügel. This painting, Shepherd and Flock, must be pretty representative of his work as he seems to be recognized primarily as a painter of cattle and sheep (of which there were several examples here).  Again, I'm sorry that this image is so poor, as the textures and the facial depictions of the sheep are so evocative of remembrances of the little exposure I've had with sheep.  You can feel that gentle warmth of that wool nudging against your thighs if you were that shepherd.  Well done, Heinrich!

What added to the delight of meandering through the galleries was that there was a string quartet from the Seattle Youth Symphony playing.  There were chairs set up, but the size of the galleries and the central location of the quartet made it possible to hear the music throughout the entire museum.  They were playing Mozart and Haydn, which was pleasant enough, but then they switched over to playing the Borodin string quartet...the slightly anachronistic romantic nature of which seemed ideal for the old fashioned art I was viewing. (Click here to listen to Borodin while you continue).

But the real delight came in the final gallery (or perhaps I was going in reverse order and this was meant to be the first gallery).  It was a small room, not much bigger than my bedroom, really, and on each wall hung a single large painting.  To the north was the largest, Sainte Genevieve (1887) by Charles Sprague Pearce.  For a painting 125  years old, the young girl depicted here looks radically contemporary--her face and features and even the textiles of her clothing make her someone you would not at all be surprised to see hanging out in a campus coffee shop...carrying off a little of a disaffected hipster air with brilliance.  The painting (as all four in this gallery) is something over 8 feet tall, I'd guess.  The cattle, unfortunately, are not nearly as convincing or appealing as von Zügel's sheep.

Turning to the east, one is confronted with a lovely John Singer Sargent full length portrait--this one of Mrs. Frederick William Roller (1894).  This enormous portrait has all the hallmarks of a great Sargent portrait..the thoughtful countenance, the liveliness of the highlights in the eyes and hair that make it seem like the person might speak or move at any moment.  Unlike so many other of Sargent portraits, it seems little intent was to impress with the wealth or extravagance of the sitter.  The gown, I'm sure is opulent, but is painted to downplay its luxury rather than the reverse.  Very restrained but not uncomfortably so.



And then we turn to the south and find this enormous backwards portrait by John White Alexander:  Woman in Black (1896).  This was an artist whose name I didn't recognize at first, but after some research remembered being struck by a painting of his in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts a few years ago (Isabella and the Pot of Basil).  I found this portrait so unusual in that it shows so little of the woman...essentially nothing but a fraction of her cheek and a hand, yet the book, her sweeping hair, the folds of the fabric in her dress, her slouching pose create such a vivid picture of who this woman is, what captivates her, and what might she be lost in thought about in her reading.  I love portraits that suggest thoughts about what is not shown as much as what is illustrated on the surface.

And finally, turning to the west and seeing yet another enormous portrait on the fourth wall is almost overwhelming.  This fourth is Portrait of a Lady against Pink Ground (Miss Virginia Gerson) (1886) by William Merritt Chase.  This portrait seems uncharacteristically misty compared to his other paintings with which I'm familiar.  The pastel nature and the slightness of the detail made me assume this was somethng by Whistler before I read the information placard.  But if it were a Whistler, even the pale pink probably would be more vivid color than he would have included.

At any rate, it was fascinating to view these four portraits that were painted within 10 years of each other...in some ways so similar and in others not a like at all.

These are the excursions that make me love museums.  Highly recommended if you ever find yourself in Seattle with an hour or so to fill.

Rating: