We spent the weekend in NYC visiting friends of ours who moved abroad three years ago … actually, we spent the entire weekend taking pictures of their adorable son, and their friends and family who were also in town to visit!
Five years ago, Brian and I spent the day after Christmas at the Met, and we did the exact same thing this year. Several hours of gallery after gallery after gallery – it was wonderful. It doesn’t need to be said that the Met has an incredibly spectacular collection, and I felt like every time I turned around or entered another room, I ran in to old friend. (Yes, I know I’m a nerd).
Every year, the Met has a spectacular Christmas display in one of the Medieval galleries and I always love seeing that. They were also showing an exhibit of Bernini’s clay sculptures. Bernini sculpted many of the famous monuments that we just saw in Rome two months ago, so it was pretty incredible to see his ‘sketches’.
Photoblog entry from our visit to the Met in 2007
I finally finished a painting that I’ve been working on for a while. It’s not my masterpiece, but I love it. Â Life occasionally gets in the way of painting, and this one may have sat on the back-burner for quite a while. I started this painting two years ago, almost to the day.
You might not be surprised by this: I love going to museums. On the day after Christmas in 2007, Brian and I spent the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, again this might not surprise you, I took a lot of pictures.
It’s not just that I love art — I love galleries, and Gallery 810 at the Met is perfect — deep dusty rose walls, parquet floors, columns, arched doorways, and a huge skylight, not to mention the shiny gilded frames holding glimpses in to other worlds, including the world of the mysterious Madame X.
Gallery 810
Metropolitan Museum of Art
oil on 12×18″ canvas
2010-2012
beckydimattia.com
John Singer Sargent
Madame X (Portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau)
1884
Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 1884, John Singer Sargent exhibited his gorgeous portrait of Madame Gautreau at the Paris Salon, but it was not well-received. Critics argued that it was obscene, and Madame Gautreau was humiliated. Despite demands, Sargent refused to withdraw it from the salon, although he later repainted the sitter’s right shoulder-trap so that it was on her shoulder rather than loosely draped on her arm.
In 1916, Sargent sold the portrait, known as Madame X, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, commenting to the Met’s director “I suppose it is the best thing I have ever done.” In 2004, Deborah Davis wrote Strapless, a fabulous book about Sargent and Madame X. In 2007, when I got to see Madame X, she was hanging in Gallery 811, framed beautifully by the arched doorway of Gallery 810.
According to the Met’s website, she can now be found in Gallery 711. At some point, she was moved from the European paintings to the American paintings. Apparently, John Singer Sargent has been hard to classify since he was an American born Florence and he lived and worked in Paris and London before painting wealthy New Yorkers and Bostonians (such as Isabella Stewart Gardner) when he was my age.
click here for the Met’s page on Madame XÂ
My painting is based on a composite of these two photos:
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And this is the Met’s photo of Gallery 810 from their page on the gallery:
Please visit beckydimattia.com to see my other recent paintings.Â
After touring Ground Zero, we walked through Lower Manhattan, past Trinity Church and Wall Street, to an incredible  after-wedding brunch before hitting the road and heading back to Boston.
When my cousin mentioned that our hotel was right near ground zero, I didn’t realize that the hotel was actually AT ground zero. As we circled the jam-packed block trying to find the hotel’s garage, I took the first photo in this series from the car – we were right next to the enormous construction zone at ground zero.
Our room on the 31st floor of the hotel had an absolutely jaw-droppingly staggering view of ground zero and the new 9/11 Memorial, which we toured the following morning. The 9/11 Memorial consists of 30-foot waterfalls set in the foot prints of the north and south towers, with the names of 9/11 victims engraved in panels all the way around. The waterfalls created a great deal of white-noise, which allowed each visitor the chance for peaceful reflection in the middle of a massive construction site.
We spent the day wandering around New York City before my cousin’s wedding. After driving to Lower Manhattan, we then took the subway to the Frick Collection – one of my favorite museums, which I hadn’t seen in almost 10 years.
On the day after Christmas, I took the train down to NYC to meet Brian and we spent the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Five years later, we did the same thing
