Wonderful Washington Day 3, Part 2

After we left the Capitol Building, we walked down to the National Gallery of Art. This has 2 main parts - the west building and the east building - east is post 20th century art, west is pre 20th century. We went west.

There was an exhibition on the ground floor called 'The Chester Dale Collection - from Impressionism to Modernism'. Dale and his wife collected and then eventually donated an enormous number of significant artworks to the nation, and they are usually spread throughout the gallery but have all been brought together for this exhibition.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing! Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Picasso, Renoir, Gaugin, Matisse, Cassatt, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet, Dali, Braque, and multiple paintings from each artist. I had seen some of these artists' paintings before and most of them in books but to see the real thing, and so many all together...it was amazing. Even more amazing was that we were able to take photos of all the paintings - in fact security seemed rather casual given the priceless artworks! (not that we tried to take one from the wall... although Michael was tempted!)

Mike channeling Thomas Crown

The boys loved it too. They do a lot of art at school and so had studied quite a few of the artists represented there and could point out features and characteristics of different artists and their paintings. Poor Max (who had an unhappy relationship with Picasso in Year 3) had to confront some more paintings from his 'blue phase', luckily it ended up better than it did 3 years ago! My favourite painting was Picasso's 'Madame Picasso' (I've never been a real fan of his before either but it is a beautiful painting). Aidan preferred Monet's 'The Houses of Parliament, Sunset' (with Mike, above) and Luke loved Monet's Venice paintings.

Madame Picasso

After seeing that exhibition (which was free, too - everything we saw in DC was), we headed upstairs and each borrowed headphones and an audio device and did a children's tour of the gallery - where select paintings have a number on them and you type the number in and hear about the history, artist, themes etc of the painting. The children's tour was excellent - they had actors voicing different characters in the paintings and pointed out things the boys were interested in. We saw some renaissance paintings (in fact, something by each of the ninja turtles, as Ethan pointed out!) through to the early 20th century. The gallery's most famous work is by Leonardo da Vinci called 'Ginevra de' Benci'- he painted it before he did the Mona Lisa and it's in a similar style.

Ginevra

We had a very happy couple of hours there (I could stay all day, if not a whole week and still not see it all!) and reluctantly left -there was one more Museum to fit in that day!

An atrium at the Art Gallery (there were a number of spaces like this inside the gallery)

Karen