The Mentor: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 3

The Mentor: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 3

Everything superfluous has been eliminated. What detail there is,--the

chest, the salver, the rug, is all in keeping with the design as a

whole. No description can do justice to the handling of the textiles,

or suggest the accuracy of their values. The marvel of it is how

so many tones of yellow could be heaped one upon the other without

wearying the eye.

 

Regnault’s death was deeply mourned by his fellow-artists. He was

exempt from military duty because of having won the _Prix de Rome_, but

at the outbreak of the war he insisted that he was needed, and enlisted

as a private in the 60th Battalion. When urged to accept a commission

he replied, “I cannot allow you to make of a good soldier an inferior

officer.” Just a few days before the capitulation of Paris, he was

killed in a sortie at Buzenval, January 19, 1871.

 

Two of his pictures, a portrait of General Prim and the “Execution

without Judgment under the Caliphs,” are in the Louvre. One of his

finest canvases, “Automedon with the Horses of Achilles,” is in the

Boston Museum of Fine Arts. A study for the Boston picture is in a

private gallery in Philadelphia.

 

PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION

ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 6, No. 9. SERIAL No. 157

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.

 

 

 

 

[Illustration: IN THE FLETCHER COLLECTION, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART,

NEW YORK

 

GLEBE FARM, WITH THE TOWER OF LANGHAM CHURCH, BY CONSTABLE]

 

 

 

 

_THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART_

 

_John Constable_

 

SIX

 

 

That the Metropolitan Museum should have so splendid an example of

Constable’s style is most fortunate. For it is just the richness

and glow of color that are seen in the “Glebe Farm” that make the

“Cornfield,” the “Hay Wain” and the “Valley Farm” of the London

National Gallery so supremely fine. While not so ambitious as these or

the much larger “White Horse,” shown at the time the paintings of the

J. Pierpont Morgan Collection were on exhibition, it is quite in the

same class.

 

Constable’s struggle for recognition was long and arduous. After

persistent opposition on the part of his fiancée’s family, he was

married when forty years old. There followed twelve years of happiness;

the death of his wife at the end of that time was a blow from which

Constable never recovered. His election as an Academician came within

three months of her death, but his reply to the announcement was, “It

has been delayed until I am solitary and cannot impart it.”

 

Constable was born in Suffolk County, England, June 11, 1776, and

lived to be sixty-one years of age. He became a student at the Royal

Academy when he was twenty-three. Three years later he exhibited his

first picture. Strangely enough, his work was appreciated in France

before it won its way at home. He exerted a marked influence upon the

rising school of French landscape painters. A medal was awarded him for

pictures exhibited at the Salon in 1824, and the next year the “White

Horse” won another for him at Lille. During the early years of his

career, commissions for portraits were undertaken as a temporary relief

to his finances. One of the best of these portraits hangs in the Hearn

Collection at the Metropolitan Museum.

 

Constable’s pictures are very uneven in merit, but whether successful

or not, there is always evident a sturdy love for nature and a faithful

effort to record her moods. He never painted anything but his beloved

England, and few of her artist-lovers have surpassed him in depicting

her rural beauties. Many of his canvases are as glowing with color as a

hillside after a shower. His compositions are seldom grandiloquent, as

are some of Turner’s, but even Turner did not have a better eye for the

dramatic placing of a thunder-cloud. Like Corot, Constable portrayed

again and again a few scenes and localities that he knew thoroughly,

painting first from one angle and then changing to a new point of view.

The sincerity of the artist speaks from even the hastiest sketch.

England no longer withholds her admiration for his work; his pictures

now command the prices brought by “old masters.”

 

PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION

ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 6, No. 9. SERIAL No. 157

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.

 

 

 

 

THE MENTOR · · JUNE 15, 1918

 

DEPARTMENT OF FINE ARTS

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

 

By SYDNEY P. NOE

 

_MENTOR GRAVURES_

 

PORTRAIT OF FEDERIGO GONZAGA

 

By Francia

 

OLD WOMAN CUTTING HER NAILS

 

By Rembrandt

 

JAMES STUART, DUKE OF LENNOX

 

By Van Dyck

 

[Illustration]

 

_MENTOR GRAVURES_

 

YOUNG WOMAN WITH A WATER-JUG

 

By Vermeer

 

SALOME

 

By Regnault

 

GLEBE FARM, WITH THE TOWER OF LANGHAM CHURCH

 

By Constable

 

[Illustration]

 

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF HENRY G. MARQUAND. By John S. Sargent

 

Mr. Marquand was the second president of the Metropolitan Museum]

 

Entered as second-class matter March 10, 1913, at the

postoffice at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879.

Copyright, 1918, by The Mentor Association, Inc.

 

NOTE.--In choosing the illustrations for this number, we have

selected, for the most part, pictures that have not been

reproduced in The Mentor heretofore. The Mentor has drawn

largely on the Metropolitan Museum for illustrations, many of

the well-known masterpieces there having been reproduced in

one number or another. A list of Metropolitan Museum pictures

already published in The Mentor will be supplied on request.

 

 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, among all the art collections in our

country, undoubtedly has the best claim to first importance, and is

becoming more and more a place of pilgrimage for the hosts that visit

New York each year.

 

The Metropolitan Museum has grown so that it is no longer to be

compassed in a morning visit. The pictures alone require more than

that, many times more, and they form but one department. Much greater

benefit will come from part of a day or a whole day spent with a single

school of painting. As far as possible, this is the way in which the

pictures are hung, but several bequests have been conditional upon

their being kept intact, and a trip from one end of the building to

the other is sometimes necessary to compare pictures by the same

artist. The paintings now owned number about twelve hundred. Not all of

these are on exhibition, but loaned pictures bring the total to about

that figure.

 

[Illustration: TITUS, SON OF REMBRANDT. By Rembrandt]

 

New York was founded by the Dutch, and it is a singular coincidence

that the Dutch School is the strongest at the Metropolitan Museum. Both

Hals and Rembrandt, the leaders of this school, are well represented,

and in few European museums can Rembrandt and his school be studied to

better purpose. Hals was born in 1584, Rembrandt in 1606. Rembrandt

worked in Amsterdam, Hals at Haarlem, only fourteen miles away. There

are several pictures attributed to Hals, the elder and younger, and

the number is sometimes increased by loans. “The Merry Company,” in

the Altman Collection, is more pretentious than the others, but if it

could be hung between the two portraits in the Marquand Room at the

head of the main stairway, it would seem garish alongside the masterly

treatment of the blacks in the “Portrait of a Man,” or the wonderful

drawing of the hands in the “Portrait of a Woman.”

 

[Illustration: WHEATFIELDS. By Jacob van Ruisdael]

 

The pictures by Rembrandt and his school are the chief glories of the

Museum--no less than sixteen pictures are attributed to his hand. In

an earlier number of The Mentor, Rembrandt’s three styles have been

clearly distinguished. It is to the first or “gray” period that the

“Portrait of a Man” belongs, and most admirably does it represent the

class. “The Man with a Steel Gorget” falls in the middle or “golden”

period. The greater part of the pictures belong to the late period--the

years in which fortune no longer smiled, and sorrow succeeded sorrow.

The portrait of Titus, his son, while still a lad, must have come

early in this period, and before troubles thickened. A few years later

comes the “Old Woman Cutting Her Nails,” hailed by many as the finest

of the Museum’s Rembrandts, but different from anything else by him

there. Hanging beside it is the “Lady with a Pink”--a portrait with

an overpowering sense of reserve force. What luminous shadows and

what living color it has! So also with its companion piece, though to

a lesser degree. Compare them with the two portraits of men in the

Dutch Room at the other end of the building. They too come in the

late period. What tremendous dignity and poise show forth from these canvases!