#museum of fine arts boston

[arthistoryanimalia]

For #InternationalCatDay 😻

Richard H. Recchia (American, 1885 – 1983) Persian Cat, 1931 Bronze, black patina, lost wax cast 49.53 x 26.03 x 30.48 cm (19 1/2 x 10 1/4 x 12 in.) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 1984.746

[fashionsfromhistory]

Dress

1960s

Afghanistan or Uzbekistan

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

[resplendentoutfit]

John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925) • Portrait of Louise Pomeroy Inches • 1887 • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Evening Dress • Unidentified Maker • American • Silk velvet with silk plain weave lining

How wonderful that such a well-preserved dress exists to enliven a famous portrait painting! This dress is one of my favorites for a couple of reasons – firstly, I love velvet and this silk velvet is the real deal – gorgeous. Secondly, I've seen the portrait many times at the MFA in Boston. The dress was in a glass case at the blockbuster Fashioned by Sargent exhibition also at the MFA.

I've read that Louise Inches was expecting her third child when she sat for this portrait and that the dress had been designed to accommodate extra panels as her figure expanded. She and Sargent got on well. Both were music lovers and accomplished musicians.

[lionofchaeronea]

Evening (The Fall of Day), William Rimmer, 1870

[the-forest-library]

Moonlight, Woodstock - Herman Dudley Murphy

Moonlit Landscape - Edward Steichen

Museum of Fine Arts Boston

[pagansphinx]

John Singer Sargent (American, worked in Britain) • The Countess of Rocksavage (Sybil Sassoon) • 1922 • Private collection

Gallery text (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; special exibition: Fashioned by Sargent) :

Severe and frontal, Sargent's painting gives Sybil Sassoon the status and authority of an old master portrait. He must have had something deliberate in mind when he painted this, late in his career, since he was the one to order Sybil's dress from the House of Worth (displayed nearby). Its design resembles a 16th-century portrait of the queen of Spain, Anna of Austria, a member of the powerful Habsburg dynasty. The distinctive gold brooch in the shape of a double-headed eagle is the Habsburg insignia, and the jewel appears in both paintings. Sybil's brother Philip, a connoisseur and collector, owned the brooch, as well as the significant rope of pearls Sybil wears, which had been their mother's.

[collectionstilllife]

Frank Weston Benson (American, 1862-1951) • The Silver Screen • Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

[internationalemeteorologie]

Andrew L. von Wittkamp

Black Cat on a Chair. ca. 1850

[didoofcarthage]

Woman Wearing a Laurel Wreath (The Personification of Poetry) by Rosalba Carriera

Italian, c. 1724

pastel on paper

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

[mote-historie]

Frank Weston Benson (American, 1862-1951), The Silver Screen, 1921.

Benson invented still life elements when necessary, but he took care to represent the Chinese ginger jar in The Silver Screen with almost photographic accuracy. Still in the Benson family, the jar dates from the Qing dynasty (about 1650). Archival photographs show that Benson’s use of color, placement of figures, and abbreviation of landscape elements on his painted jar appear identical to the real object. He most likely acquired it, along with its nineteenth-century teak carved stand and top, from well-known Boston importer Yamanaka. (x)

Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

[solnunquamoccidit]

Retrato de una dama

by Juan Carreño de Miranda (Galician, 1614 - 1685) oil on canvas (47 × 57,8 cm), c. 1670

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

[arthistoryanimalia]

#Caturday dress up:

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (American, 1791-1872)

Little Miss Hone, 1824

Oil on canvas mounted on plywood

On display at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Best known for inventing the telegraph and the Morse code, Samuel Morse began his career as a painter. He made this portrait of five-year-old Mary Hone for her father, Isaac, a New York auctioneer. Echoing sentimental English pictures of children, Morse shows her rehearsing her future role as a mother. He wrote: ‘I shall paint her with a cat set up in her lap like a baby, with a towel under its chin, and a cap on its head, and she employed in feeding it with a spoon.’”

[fashionsfromhistory]

"Barbade" Evening Ensemble

Christian Lacroix for House of Patou

Spring 1987

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Accession Number: 2010.386.1-4)

[garadinervi]

Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper, Edited by Diane Upright, Introduction by Henry Geldzahler, The Fort Worth Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX / Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY, 1987 [Exhibitions: The Fort Worth Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, September 13 – October 25, 1987; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, December 2, 1987 – January 31, 1988; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, March 5 – May 15, 1988; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, May 29 – July 24, 1988; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, August 11 – September 25, 1988; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, October 22 – December 31, 1988]

[lionofchaeronea]

Ravine, Vincent van Gogh, 1889

[larobeblanche]

John Singer Sargent (American, worked in UK and Europe, 1856-1925) In a Garden, Corfu • 1909

Detail

Photo credit: ©Pagan Sphinx Photography

Photo by me taken at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's current exhibition, Fashioned by Sargent. A collection of gorgeous Sargent portraits and displays of attire worn by the subjects of those portraits, while also illuminating the ways in which fashion played a key role in his artistic process. Follow the link for the complete introductory exhibition text.

The label for this work:

Sargent's friend and fellow painter Jane de Glehn reads in the garden of the Villa Soteriotisa in Corfu, where she, her husband Wilfred, and other close friends were spending several weeks with Sargent and his sister Emily. The two other women beside her (look carefully in the corners) are both Eliza Wedgwood, giving us the hint that this entire composition is Sargent's invention. The stiff blue-white skirt that Jane wears was Sargent's-a studio prop. It was made of taffeta, described by Eliza as the color of a robin's egg, and completely out of fashion in 1909, when skirts were becoming slimmer and were usually made of softer fabrics. But Sargent preferred this full, stiff taffeta skirt which he could manipulate to create the deep valleys and folds of cloth he loved to paint.