The National Gallery - West Building - Part 3

After a cumulative 10 hours in the National Gallery this month, I've made it through the galleries on the main floor.  The final galleries (52-93) didn't provide as cohesive an experience as my other West Gallery jaunts.   I started in 18th and 19th century Spanish art (in other words...Goya) and moved into 19th century French.

Thérèse Louise de Sureda - Francisco de Goya - 1803_1804

 I'm not such a fan of early 19th century work in general...too many pink people in pastel dresses, lounging around.  I found that I was more attracted to the frames in most cases than the paintings themselves. 

Diana and Endymion - Fragonard - 1753 - Frame Detail

I did enjoy one gallery that featured David and Ingres, two of my favorites from my French art history classes.  David's Napoleon is the centerpiece of the gallery, but I was drawn to the much smaller portrait of Madame David.  There is something so honest and open in her look and the way he painted her.  She looks like she is someone you could sit down with over a cup of tea.

Madame David - Jacques-Louis David - 1813

I was worried that things were going from bad to worse when I entered British and American Landscapes.  The cityscapes by Joseph Turner were the exception to this.  His use of light in all of his paintings is striking and draws me into the scene in a way that the random "field, mountain, lake with trees" scenes don't.  They are too big and too impersonal.

Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight    Venice:The Dogana and San Giorgio Maggiore

1834 and 1835 / both by Joseph Mallord William Turner

The last of galleries were a melange of British and American portraiture, American Primitive Paintings, and 19th and early 20th century American works.  The primitive paintings were captivating, in part because so little is known about the lives of the artists in many cases.  There were some American Impressionist works like Childe Hassam's Allies Day, that I enjoyed,  In general, I found myself drawn to gritty rather than pretty...the woman alone in Sargent's Repose or the inner city scene in Bellow's The Lone Tenement. 

Allies Day, May 1917                                         Little Miss Fairfield

Childe Hassam - 1917                              William Matthew Prior - 1850

Detail from The Lone Tenement - George Bellows - 1909

Repose - John Singer Sargent - 1911

Next weekend, the final installment of the National Gallery - West.....