riari

Today, I fed my mind.

For the past several months, the museum of fine arts has an exhibit of paintings from the Metropolitian Museum in New York.

The Masterpieces of French Painting from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: 1800–1920.

From the Met's site: A selection of 135 masterpieces from the Museum’s treasured collection of French painting—including works by Bonnard, Cézanne, Corot, Courbet, Degas, Van Gogh, Ingres, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, and Renoir—will be lent exclusively to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin while the Museum’s own galleries are renovated.

I've been wanting to go but I've been thwarted due to not having a Saturday off to go. After all, this may be the only way I could see these paintings.

But today,

sly_1, her boyfriend, and I managed to get time off to go visit. Apparently, the museum has free admission on Thursdays. And as such, the exhibit was much cheaper than normal today.

Even at the later time we were able to get tickets to, it was still rather crowded. So we didn't spend a lot of time at any particular painting. It was rather awesome to see these paintings in person. I'm linking to pages of the painting on the Met's webpage so you can see the painting I'm talking about.

I've known Degas only through the dancer paintings he has done like this one: Dancers in the Rehearsal Room with a Double Bass. It's amazing that a well known painting was in actuality a very small one: The Dancing Class. There was even a very vivid painting of dancers in green: Dancers, Pink and Green.

I've seen so many Monet pictures, but there were at least four of his paintings there. The water effect he painted was beautiful, especially on La Grenouillere. One of his famous water lily paintings are there and there was one I rather liked. It was a winter picture done all in icy whites and blues. When you look at it, it first seems like there are blobs in the background. At a closer look, it is naked tree branches in the cold fog. I believe this was done by Monet but I can't find the image right now. It was on the same wall as the other Monet paintings.

A couple of still lifes made us a bit hungry. Cezanne's still life of apples looked delicious. The still life with peaches looked especially delicious.

And, I'm proud to say, I have seen a Van Gogh. The one in this exhibit being displayed is Cypresses. The amount of paint used on that painting was amazing. It gave it a textured look. I really liked the swirls used in the clouds and the mountains.

There were even two Picasso paintings there from his blue period. And a self portrait that looked a little weird since one of the eyes in the painting was almost all black.

And the end the exhibit, there were some paintings with creepy green eyes. There was of course the exhibition shop at the end.

sly_1 kindly bought me an umbrella with the blue water lily painting on it. It's gorgeous. I even saw a book set for $20 that had all of the European paintings from the 16th to the 19th century. It looked really good for the price but I refrained from purchasing them. ^_^

I'm glad I got to see this exhibit. It apparently, as

sly_1 mentioned for other traveling exhibits, is being lent to the MFA due to renovations being done to the wing it is located in at the Met. It's nice that we were chosen to be the US city to house it for a time.