Friends and Culture

This past week I spent about four hours at The Frick, a collection of priceless largely European art masterpieces collected by (and located in the former urban mansion of) robber baron Henry Frick at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street. What made my day was that Greg, an artist and teacher of art who belongs to my book club, accompanied me. Our last art crawl was at the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, with our wives, in the spring. All of the art takes on new meaning with greater insight into subject, composition, style and brushwork when Greg talks about it. I learned quite a bit from Greg about Christianity, which was the subject of several paintings of saints and bible scenes: St. Jerome, The Stigmata, etc.

The highlight of this show, however, was Vermeer's "The Girl With The Pearl Earing," on loan with about 20 other paintings by Vermeer and his contemporaries from a museum in Amsterdam.  I was surprised at how small "The Girl" is, only about 14" by 20", and they showed it alone in a room with walls for 20 paintings, and showed photographs of how it had looked before it was restored. Quite an improvement. The girl is looking back over her left shoulder with her mouth half open as if saying "What?" and the light streaming from over that shoulder too, in an exotic headdress and in a very naturalistic style. Yes, the Dutch Masters were, well, masters.

And I was pleased that I was able to help Greg to a greater understanding of a few of the paintings, those by the great English painter of landscapes (and windscapes) featuring sailboats, Joseph Mallord William Turner. At the website you can see and enlarge five of his works in this collection, three in European harbors and two out at sea, approaching harbors.  I taught Greg about points of sail. The Tate Gallery in London, where I first made Turner's acquaintance,  has many more of his paintings. Turner captured the power of storms at sea, and he did it without a camera to record the image photographically. He worked in the first half of the 19th Century.

And the next day we had a visit from Bob and Brenda of "Pandora", also a Saga 43, see www.sailpandora.com, currently at a dock in Florida while they deal with some issues and the holidays up here in the frozen north. Their son, Chris, who earlier in the day had passed the final orals for his PhD in physics at Columbia joined us for a great dinner. Last time we broke bread with them was in their home in Essex CT, in June. Good food (if I do say so myself) and good conversation with good friends. Does life get any better?  Well, on a boat -- but not with the temperature in the 20's! Bob and Brenda slept over in our not very luxurious guest accommodations, but they are used to sleeping on a boat so they were fine -- even with the feline alarm clocks! After breakfast we saw them off -- headed for The Frick.