April 23: Birthday of J.M.W. Turner

James Mallord William Turner (1775 -1851 ) made many visits to Venice and painted some of his best-known works there. This 1842 view is of the city's back door--in contrast to the usual scenes of the Grand Canal, the Basin of S. Marco, and the Rialto Bridge (all of which Turner also painted). It looks onto the Campo Santo--literally "holy ground"-- on the right, the walled cemetery island of San Michele. Venice actually occupies 117 tiny islands, prone to flooding, saved (partially) from the ravages of the Adriatic tides only by a long barrier island, the Lido. Given this watery environment, burials in residential areas are especially unwise, and ancient Italo-Roman tradition is to isolate cemeteries from the city proper. On the left are buildings of the Cannareggio district, partly deliniated in pencil. (A work of about the same date in the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College treats the architecture in the same way). In the foreground, working gondolas--rather like trucks--take piles of goods across the water.
Even this alley view conveys the magical quality of Venetian light and the romantic allure of the city called La Serenissima, the most serene. The angelic, double-sailed boat, reflected in the still water, is a bright and poetic focal point among the softly blurred, low horizontals of the distant architecture. Sky occupies the majority of the canvas, with gathering wispy clouds that read simultaneously as landscape elements and the self-conscious tracks of the artist's hand.
This is my favorite painting at the Toledo Museum of Art. When I worked there, I visited it often--when I was stuck, frustrated, uninspired, often after the galleries closed to the public and it was lit with only the indirect glow of the laylights above. Had the building caught fire, I would have run to retrieve it. While I could say even more about it, for reasons I can't explain it comforted me, then as now, beyond words.

April 21: The Birthday of John Muir

This spectacular painting by German-born Luminist Albert Bierstadt (1830 -1902 ) seems a fitting image with which to note the birthdate of naturalist John Muir (1838-1914). Its subject, Hetch Hetchy Canyon, was the site of Muir's last, unsuccessful battle to preserve the natural splendor of the West.

First proposed in 1903, the O'Shaughnessy Dam on the Tuolumne River was begun in 1913 and completed 10 years later. The Hetchy Hetchy Reservoir, which provides drinking water and electricity to 2.4 million Californians, is still opposed by the Sierra Club, which Muir co-founded in 1892. Bierstadt's painting of the unspoiled valley is an emblem of the effort to restore Hetch Hetchy, which continues nearly 100 years later(http://www.hetchhetchy.org/artistic_visions/bierstadt_holyoke.html).

Bierstadt's painting, completed in 1875, was the founding gift to the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum the next year. Like many of Bierstadt's works, it is of a stunning scale and utterly mesmerizing glow, especially in the modestly-sized galleries at my alma mater's fine museum. An unrepentant Italophile for the entirety of my undergraduate career, I ignored this fine and important painting, a lapse which I now repent and for which hereby attempt in some small way to attone.