New York Page 3

June 2013

The following day, after a relaxing breakfast with Diane and Frank, we took a walk around the Central Park reservoir.  Of course Frank and Diane walk most every day, and sometimes report their mileage.  Frank determined that because we didn't really walk anywhere the day before, we did not get any mileage credit for our museum visit.  So at least this day we got some miles!  (1.65, according to Diane.)  It was another fine, if overly hot, day. 

We next went to the Guggenheim museum.  The building is very interesting.  The collection itself has some nice pieces, but overall we would prefer to go to either the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art to view modern pieces.  We are glad to have gone, though, and experience this particular museum.  They request no picture taking, so we can't show you the graceful curved interior of the walls.

After leaving the Guggenheim, we went back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  We can now say that we have covered all of the (open to the public) areas of the Met (although not necessarily every single room).  We had not previously gone to the Asian, Ancient Near East, or Arabic sections of the museum.  So those were our first goals for this day.  These were well worth visiting.  For one thing, we discovered an underutilized lavatory. 

The Asian section had an interesting mix of periods in each area.  There was an exhibit featuring birds in the art of Japan.  This included gorgeous ink painted screens from the 1500s and 1600s, like this one, and sculptures from as recent as 2012.

They had a computer display of woodprint pages from a book, one of which was Heavenly Blue Morning Glories!  (For anyone not 'in the know', this particular shade of morning glory is prized at various family locations.)

This could be our new dining room table , except that we would need a new house to fit it in:

But with the new house, perhaps we could put in these doorway guards.

The Met rearranged earlier this year.  As we wandered around the rest of the museum, we were able to find some of the works that we could not find the previous day with Lisa.  Some of these are:

Canaletto's Piazza San Marco

Petrus Christus' Portrait of a Carthusian.  Notice the 'fly' on the painted 'frame'; we love that detail.

And the Surrealist Movement doesn't have anything over painters of the 1500s.  You might recall the wonderful Four Seasons in One Head from the National Gallery.  Another great piece is Christ's Descent into Hell, from around 1560.

And we should mention one of Frank's and our favorite artists, Jacob van Ruisdael.   This particular painting is one of his early works.

Salomon Van Ruysdael was confusing us at first, having a similar name to Jacob.  Salomon is another outstanding Dutch landscape painter, and the uncle of Jacob.

Another interesting painting is Emanuel de Witte's Interior of the Oude Kerk, Delft.  It is a beautifully rendered interior of a church - with a dog peeing on a column and two children writing graffiti on a column!  Interestingly, at this time the Met write-up does not address these elements of the painting. (note from the future: the current page does mention those aspects.)

One last painting we will mention is done by a student of Caravaggio: Orazio Borgianni's Head of an Old Woman.   It is a wonderful study of an older woman.

Although there are many other items that we could feature, the final thing we will leave you is the most common display in the museum: models of Archimedes' screw which are displayed in pairs connected by rope.

On to the last page of this trip report ...

Updated April 2026