Sky's the Limit (originally entitled "A Little Bit of Sky")

(at The Morgan Library and Museum, New York City)

By ROBERT EDWARD BULLOCK, Special to the Sun | April 24, 2014

Though it seems obvious today, it was only after the mid-1700s that artists began painting directly from nature in the plain light of day -- a radical evolution at the time. Working outside the studio, painters were challenged to quickly capture the changes in light, clouds and atmosphere in the natural world around them.

Termed "plein air" by the French, this practice of working outdoors called for small, portable equipment and materials. The practice of oil sketching on paper was advantageous. Though the intention may have been to develop these small studies into larger works back in the studio, we value them today for their own merits.

(Read the entire review at The New York Sun.)

Eugène Isabey (1803-1886), 'Sunset on the Normandy Coast,' Oil on paper, mounted on canvas. 

Thaw Collection, jointly owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum; gift of Eugene V. Thaw, 2009.

Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857), 'Cloud Study,' Oil on paper.
Thaw Collection, jointly owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum; gift of Eugene V. Thaw, 2009.

Jean-Michel Cels (1819–1894), 'Cloud Study.' Oil on cardboard.

Thaw Collection, jointly owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library & Museum; gift of Eugene Thaw, 2009.

Flesh and Shadow

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 602: European Paintings)

Flesh and Shadow

by Robert Edward Bullock, Special to the Sun

Two paintings currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art provide a glimpse of the achievements and the variety of subjects in seventeenth-century Italian painting. A fertile and creative artistic environment gave birth to some of the greatest talents in Western art that, like constellations of bright stars, cause us to stop and stare nearly four hundred years later.

Alongside scenes from the Bible and saints lives were those from ancient mythology, such as Danaë. Confined to a tower as a virgin by her father, the king, because of a prophecy that he would be killed by the son she would bear, Danaë is visited by the god Jupiter, who appears as a shower of gold and lays with her for the night. Their son, Perseus, grows to one day behead Medusa and to accidentally kill his grandfather. 

Orazio Gentileschi (b.1563) dramatizes the story's key event with mannerist effect. His "Danaë" (ca.1621) shows the princess full and fertile, the classical ideal, reclining on a royal bed against the enveloping shadows as a putto clumsily raises the heavy drapery, bathed in the light of the divine. The veil separating the worlds of gods and men is, in effect, momentarily .....

(read the full review at The New York Sun)

"Danaë" by Orazio Gentileschi. Oil on canvas, ca.1621. Private collection on temporary loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

"St Dominic in Penitence" by Filippo Tarchiani. Oil on canvas, no date given (first quarter of 17th-century). Private collection on temporary loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.