Art Museum Report

Before writing this paper, I browsed through the book, Art through the Ages, chose three pictures that I enjoyed, and then found three similar pictures from the National Art Gallery located in Washington D.C. I had never visited this museum before, but have been to other museums at the National Mall. I found the location of the pictures at the Gallery and then visited the museum. I tried to employ three art works from different eras in the book, that way they style and images were different and I would not be comparing similar works of art.

For my first work, I chose Pieter Claesz's, Vanitas Still Life created in the early 1630's, oil on panel and compared it to Willem Claesz Heda's Banquet Piece with Mince Pie created in 1635, oil on canvas.

I am comparing it to Edouard Manet’s, The Railway, created in 1873 on oil on canvas found at the National Gallery of Art. Cassatt’s painting shows the loving relationship between a mother and a child. The visual of the mother and child contrasts with the flattened patterning of the wallpaper and the rug. Her style of painting is owed to the pastel work and compositional devices of Degas (Kleiner), she found it life-changing as she became an influential Impressionist. Children and motherhood were her principal subjects, skillfully painted with simplicity, vigorous brushwork and luminescent color. Manet's painting is a colorful and charming scene of a woman with a little girl who looks down with interest onto the newly created railway lines of Paris during the 1870’s. It offers no story and no clear relationship between its figures. It's like a sight someone passing by might notice, and then forget. The smoke of a passing train obscures her view. It depicts the artist's alter ego constructing the very scene we are looking at, fusing the activity in the studio with that of the scene itself. It is, of course, not reality but an imagined scene in the Manet’s mind of the paintings own creation (National Gallery of Art). By making the girl a representation of himself, Manet communicates the masculine and feminine nature of the creative mind. The pictures are similar in that