thanks to my mother's request: Pictures, Part 1

Last Saturday, Rachel, my mother, and I visited an art museum in the town where Rachel and I attend college. The art museum is an old mansion surrounded with beautiful gardens. My mother requested that I post some of the pictures I took.

Here are pictures of four of the paintings themselves. Of course, the gallery has lots more. There are some excellent portraits, and a collection of old altarpieces from medieval times, and a gallery of Japanese screens, and a gallery of Chinese pottery.



This painting is of Cossacks in Siberia. I wrote a poem about it as my audition piece for the summer writing camp. There's a gallery of Romantic and semi-Impressionist paintings at the start of the museum, which is one of my favorite galleries. It has pastoral scenes, including one of a rough-faced, placid peasant girl escorting her sheep into a barn.






This is a pen-and-ink sketch. My grandfather owned a sailboat that looked a lot like this one, only a little bit smaller.















The entrance to the museum is a big rotunda. The dome goes up for two stories, and at its zenith is a round skylight. Directly under the skylight on the floor of the entry area below is a Rodin sculpture of Adam. On the second floor, there is a circular gallery that runs around the edge of the rotunda. The paintings in this gallery are modern still-lifes. There are some beautiful, photorealistic paintings of plants: gaudy, dewy roses; golden, full-bodied rosehips, and this one, of irises. There was also a hideous painting of a nest with two eggs in it, while the decayed corpses of the parent birds lay sprawled beside the nest. Their featherless bones stretched like scratches on the canvas. It was a painting of utter hopelessness and futility, and very gruesome to look at.






The museum also has a gallery of ancient art: an Etruscan bronze mirror with delicate etchings; a serene-faced Egyptian sarcophagus; battered Roman denarii. There were also several pieces of Greek pottery, among them this little jar. It thrilled Rachel and me greatly because the pieces of pottery were from the exact time period that we've been studying in Honors class. One of them was fired when Pericles was preaching his funeral oration to the Athenians in the midst of the Peloponnesian War. It gave me shivers to think that these same vessels are ones that were touched and handled by those distant, great men that we've read about and discussed in class.