Philadelphia Museum of Art

Hello,

This weekend S. and I traveled to Philadelphia for a little getaway and the first place we visited was the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A museum I have wanted to visit for a long time because lately we have been watching a Teaching Company lecture series given by William Kloss titled Masterworks of American Art where a lot of the paintings highlighted in the series can be found at this museum.

We were both eager to view the Thomas Eakins pieces that are part of the collection. Here are a few images I took while in the museum...

A beautiful detail of the hand and how lost and found edges are used to such great effect by Eakins

I sat in front of this portrait of J. Harry Lewis for the longest time, I was so struck by how expressive the face is even with more than half of it being in shadow.

{detail of the taffeta fabric}

While the museum has several interesting and special exhibits going on we chose to focus on the regular admission galleries making sure to visit the exhibit on George Inness in Italy which is ending May 15th. Even though I do not often paint landscapes, they are really one of my favorite types of paintings. I love how you can get lost in them and how there is such a variety of capturing different scenes and weather conditions.

One thing I learned from this exhibit is that George Inness was a master of varying paint thickness to create affect. In this paiting of Lake Nemi the paint application goes from thin layers where you can see the neutral underpainting ground to a thick impasto like this detail shows.

I was also struck by his use of color, even though Inness was a tonalist, passages in his paintings show the use of intense color.

It was a great day spent in the museum, here are a few more links that may be of interest for further investigation on Thomas Eakins and George Inness
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complete works of Thomas Eakins

complete works of George Inness