My visit to the Legion of Honor Art Museum in San Fransico (Van Gogh, Monet, and Rembrandt)

ianmcg (55)in #blog • 6 years ago (edited)

I took the BART to downtown San Francisco and then a bus to the golf course the Legion of Honor museum is on. I walked up the hill and it took me about two hours to get there. As soon as I got to the front of the museum I was already impressed. There was a beautiful view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the surrounding bay. The entrance looked like a Roman courtyard with white pillars. Directly in front of the doors was a replica of the glass pyramid in from the Louvre in Paris.

Entering the museum I went straight for a sign that said "Baroque Era Statues". I instantly felt familiar with the art in the first room. There were genre painting of commoners from the 1600s-1700s. There were scenes from myth, history, biblical stories, landscape images, portraits, and still life of food.

Many of the painting styles that we learned about in class like contemplation on skulls in Memento Mori and Dark Vanitas themes. Some of the painting were done it what looked like impasto. Lighting was used to focus on what was important in some pieces, even if it was off to the side. Darkness was used to move your eyes away from less important background parts. The emotions portrayed in the very biblical scenes were either frightening or awe inspiring. The frightening ones were full of blood and agony, the awe inspiring ones were bright and fanciful. Angels, cherubs, and even anthropomorphic people could be found in some pictures. The best area was the impressionist room with the Van Gogh, Monet, and Rembrandt. That era was just so natural and unpolished.

Another interesting thing from the museum was the mummy and Egyptian art and the furniture. There were mirrors made out of silver under glass and velvet chairs that were five or six hundred years old and looks like they were nice enough to be from the 1900's. There were odd things like cabinets, fireplaces, and ceramic bowls all decorated with Baroque era artwork.

I looked at every painting in the museum in about four hours. I saw everything they had on display. Although there was a modern art exhibit going on that cost $25 and a sculpture exhibit down stairs that I was not very interested in. The museum was much bigger than I though it would be, and I was surprised with the variety of different kinds of Baroque style art they had on display.

I was very tempted to write about the Monet, Van Gogh, and Rembrandt paintings I saw. Although I think everyone will, so here is a painting that really caught my eye in the older section of the museum. The painting Adoration of the Shepherds by Joachim Wtewael was very strange.

When I first saw this painting I thought it was a genre painting of peasants. I thought it was a picture of low class people socializing in a slum. There is dirt, a creepy-looking old man, a mangy dog, loose goats, shoe-less people, other riff-raff, and it is centered around a very pretty woman in red that appeared to me to possibly be a prostitute. I searched the name of the piece and found it was titled after a whole classification of paintings of the time. It was a religious painting. This was supposed to be a depiction of the birth of Jesus Christ. Upon further re-inspection this was indeed a nativity painting, and the most bizarre one I have ever seen. All of the other nativity scene painting in the museum have the wise men in fanciful garbs, Mary and Joseph as clean dressed people, and the manger or barn to be an organized and inviting place. This nativity was dirty and realistic.

Wtewael was a Dutch painter during the Dutch Golden Age of art. This was a period where Protestantism influenced artists to draw more common view of people, instead of only nobles. The economic boom at that time allowed artists to sell to merchants, so art was not only for churches. This allowed a more free idea of what biblical people looked like. Biblical stories were less mystical being and more real like the painting I saw. Wtewael really made the nativity scene look like something that really happened with real people. Instead of gloriously shining people with halos and angels.

Wtewael paints in a form of mannerism, where some qualities are over-proportioned. Besides that he seems to be closest to Caravaggio in style. I found anyone that was influenced by him is considered a "Caravaggisti" or "tenebrists". The Modello cartoon-like characters look like they were sketches that he painted on. The obscuring of darkness chiaroscuro centers the eye on the people that are important. The painting is dark and full of tenebrism. I liked the darkness of many of the Baroque painting I saw in this museum visit. I think I enjoyed Adoration of the Shepherds the most after finding out it was something totally different than I thought it was.