The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Daily Offering
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Posted by Meg Nola Feb 15, 2009 |
Though I don’t live in New York, I feel like I’m always just around the corner from The Metropolitan Museum of Art via the daily featured artwork on the Met's website's home page. The Met has a vast collection and checking in regularly to see which painting, photograph or exquisite object is in the spotlight is a great way to learn about the museum's treasures and explore further. Such as on this particular Sunday, John La Farge’s 1887 watercolor and gouache of The Great Statue of Amida Buddha at Kamakura, Known as the Daibutsu, from the Priest's Garden is at the Met’s virtual entrance. La Farge’s beautiful and exotic scene might make one wonder what inspired the American artist to paint such a vision and did he actually visit Japan? Clicking on the link for more details about the Featured Artwork reveals that:
On a trip to Japan…in 1886, La Farge enlisted watercolor—the familiar medium of the traveling artist—to create studies for illustrations and to paint sheets for exhibition. He executed this bold and monumental composition after his return to New York, using a watercolor sketch done during his travels as well as photographs…The Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, a fifty-foot-high bronze cast in 1252, is renowned for its colossal size, its peaceful demeanor, and its unusual site in the open air surrounded by mountains and trees.
Continued Met cyber-searching among La Farge’s contemporaries brought up the fascinating and unfinished Arab Woman by John Singer Sargent. Sargent also used watercolors for his portrait, watercolors -- as detailed in the La Farge descriptive -- being the preferred artistic medium of the time for capturing scenes while traveling.
Among last month’s Featured Artworks were Walter Launt Palmer’s gorgeous snowscape Silent Dawn (1919), and the dreamy 1893 Ice Floes by Claude Monet. If you happen to miss a day, you can check in to the present month’s or even prior months’ selections by clicking here. You can also subscribe to receive the Met’s Featured Artwork each day by signing up for the RSS feed at the museum’s main entry or "splash" page.