J.W. Waterhouse

I finally got up to the Met today. I was stunned by the fantastic job done on the new galleries for 19th century European paintings & sculpture (1800-1920). All the pictures not only in one place, but the cleanup on the paintings themselves was marvelous. (I don't know if anyone remembers, but I once made a comment about how grimey they looked, and how helter-skelter the hanging - you couldn't find anything!) Anyway - the Met expanded its holdings and renovated. Beautiful. I will try to post a small pic of the Burne-Jones' The Love Song - you have no idea how gorgeous it was!! Also, the dining room designed and supervised by Lucien Levy-Dhurmer -- made me want to cry, it was that gracious with every piece & wall space using the theme of 'wisteria,' meaning 'welcome.' Unfortunately, only the paintings are in the catalog, not the sculpture or the room. When I have a moment, I will try to scan a handful. And even though Sargent was American - & Whistler - they were included, which made perfect sense to me. C.

The book was too big for my scanner, so there's smudging on the lower left. Try to imagine this huge, beautiful painting with a gold-gilt frame. Sir Edward Burne-Jones English, 1833-1898 [i]The Love Song[/i] 1868-77 Oil on canvas 45 x 61 3/8 in. (114.3 x 155.9 cm) Initialed (lower left): EBJ The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment Fund, 1947 In 1957 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who nine years earlier had been a founding member of the circle of artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, assembled a group of seven friends to help him decorate the Oxford Union Building with scenes from Sir Thomas Malory's [i]Morte d'Arthur[/i]. Edward Burne-Jones was one of the driving forces of this 'second Brotherhood,' and his [i]Love Song[/i], with its figures reminiscent of the fifteenth-century Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio and its 'Arthurian' landscape bathed in evening light, reflects the profound influence of both the Italian Renaissance and the gothicizing Pre-Raphaelite movement. This painting was begun in 1868 and completed in 1877. It is the definitive version of several works by Burne-Jones based on the following refrain from an old Breton song: 'Hélas! je sais un chant d'amour, / Triste ou gai, tour à tour' (Alas, I know a love song, / Sad or happy, each in turn). These include a watercolor (1865, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) intended to decorate a piano that was given to the artist as a wedding gift, and a miniature in an illustrated book depicted in a watercolor that Burne-Jones painted of his model and mistress in 1870 (Clemens-Sels-Museum, Neuss). ~Gary Tinterow [i]Masterpieces of European Painting, 1800-1920, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art[/i], Yale University Press, 2007.]

The image allowance was too small for this picture, even though I already reduced it to tinyness. I shall return! C.

Had to find the right picture program - I think I have about a dozen :( I guess MS Picture Mgr did the trick - it figures. Gee, I have no idea if this will work!

If this doesn't work, I'm gonna pack it in. I know I'm making it small enough.

I was so curious ... is this it? http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/10/euwb/ho_47.26.htm Beautiful! And you saw it in person ... thanks for the information.

[img size=275]http://www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com/images/fbfiles/images/burne_jones_The_Love_Song_1868_77_Oil_on_canvas_custom.jpg[/img] Hardly worth the effort. C.

That's the one Cat - I knew I was able to do the pic, but I didn't keep an eye on the 50kb. Those colors are better of course from the museum. It was LARGE - just gorgeous! C.

I went back to what I wrote at the beginning (from the catalog/book) and I see I made a mistake on the Rossetti date, I wrote 1957. Duh. Make that 1857. (I walked home from the museum, that's my excuse for punchiness). C.