The Lorax Visits the Smithsonian

One more photo from last week when we were visiting Washington and Fairfax.

Samuel F.B. Morse at the Louvre

Last week in Washington, we saw a little-known painting by Samuel F.B. Morse. He's well known for the telegraph and Morse code, little known for his early-life career as a painter.

Morse's huge oil painting "Gallery of the Louvre," which he painted during a visit to Europe from 1829-1832, is temporarily on view in the National Gallery of Art. In it he arranged an imaginative view of the works he most valued at the Louvre. He placed them to be of use to students, and painted some of his friends and his daughter in the room where he imagined them.

The National Gallery has hung Morse's work in a large hallway in the center of the museum, along with a very interesting explanation -- and a key to the works. I recognized many of them, but the key is very useful. Above you can see his arrangement of Mona Lisa -- below is Len's photo of the work as we saw it.

Morse based the work on many prior paintings that made a similar collage-like assembly of copies from a single museum's collection. He based his choice of paintings on his own taste and that of his contemporaries. He hoped this work would bring him fame and money, as he planned to exhibit it on a tour of the US. That didn't go as well as he hoped, so he turned to technology and became famous.

For more detail about Morse's paintings and the Louvre's collected works he included, see this website.

Skaters at the National Gallery of Art

Skating at the National Gallery rink -- Miriam, Alice, and Evelyn, 2012.

"Winter Landscape with Skaters" (detail) by Adam van Breen, 1611.

Inside the National Gallery.

Morocco, London, and the High Seas

"TinTin" begins in London, where he's a reporter. His exciting adventures take place on the high seas, in an old crumbling English-country manor house, lost in the Sahara, and in a seaside city in Morocco. Quite a bit of travel!

The visuals in "TinTin" were great. Sometimes they closely followed what you see in a cartoon, sometimes departed from that. I thought they very effectively combined realism with parody. Some of the people in the film were nearly caricatures -- an opera singer, a drunken ship captain, an evil villain, a Scotland Yard team, TinTin himself, with his quiff, and most of the minor characters. Some characters at times were quite realistic like TinTin when he's making a plan, the Sultan of Morocco, Snowy the dog or a camel in the port town. Some characters started out realistic and suddenly and enjoyably switched to something unexpected. The net result: an exciting and fun to watch experience.

Fun at the Piano

Traveling Again

Fairfax, Virginia, on a beautiful sunny day in January: the shadows seem very long for the early afternoon. We walked around a small lake surrounded by houses and apartment buildings, but with just enough woods to be very pleasant.

Here's Alice:

Kagemusha

Inspired by our visit to Japan, we watched Kagemusha, an old film by Kurosawa. The visuals were fabulous: interiors that mirrored the style of the museums, traditional buildings, and gardens that we toured. Or did the traditional buildings and well-kept gardens mirror the movie sets? Maybe.

The action scenes with huge armies marching and fighting and horses speeding past the blurred background were also great, as was the plot about a thief rescued from death to be used as the double of a deceased warlord in a great struggle.

Animals

Dragons

Netsuke Horse

--from the Tokyo National Museum

Foxes

-- from a fox shrine in Ueno Park.

In Japanese mythology, foxes bring luck and money, and often have their own shrines.

Dogs and Lions

Koishikawa Korakuen Gardens

The original Korakuen Garden was begun in 1629; it was built for one of the Daimyos, or feudal lords appointed by the Edo Shogun. The red maple trees and other fall foliage were splendid when we visited it last Monday. The landscaping is intensely developed, with fish ponds, streams, arched bridges, a tiny artificial waterfall, pretend mountains and rivers named for real ones somewhere in Japan, stone lanterns, artificially-supported pine trees, rocky footpaths and stairways, trellised wisterias, and even a rice paddy.

As we walked we saw dozens of Japanese visitors with cameras, and one professional photo shoot featuring a couple of models dressed in kimonos and elaborate accessories. The Tokyo Dome is right next door, providing ultra-modern contrast with the ancient garden features.

Feeding the fish and ducks

Men working on the rice paddy; wisteria trellises in the background.

Tokyo Street Scenes

From the Edo Tokyo Museum: an idealized street scene from the past. . . and several street photos that I took while walking around last week: