May 2011
-
The grand-daughter (now age eleven), studying the Darmstadt Madonna (1528) by Hans Holbein the Younger that is reproduced in q previous post: "It doesn't look like Madonna." Grandpa: "I think it may be a different Madonna."
-
What is this remarkable object? It's a seventeenth-century Turkish rug that now resides in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's of a type called a "Holbein." And just why, pray tell, should a class of rugs be named after a sixteenth-century German painter? Was Holbein a closet weaver? Or an importer of rugs? No. The answer is that rugs of this sort appear prominently in…
-
While indulging a long, pleasant walk this morning, I happened upon a shop I had never before noticed. It's called Juno's Studio of Contemporary Hair Artistry. I ws curious as to whether a "hair artistry studio" was what we called in the old days a "barber shop" or a "beauty shop." I tried to peek inside the…
-
I visited the quirky but impressive Gauguin exhibition at the National Gallery. Some of the Tahitian paintings are genuinely "iconic" but certainly worth viewing in real life, where they're a ton more wonderful than in the familiar reproductions. In my great ignorance, I had not a shred of knowledge of Gauguin's carvings, and was…