The Solace Project #15
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Hello Friends,<br/><br/>Today we’ll talk about a provocative portrait of Sarah Sargent Allen, painted by John Singleton Copley in 1763, the provocation being her gaze, her behavior in her picture, her relationship with her husband, Nathaniel Allen, insofar as we can gauge from their two portraits.  I hear that many of you like to listen to my Sunday newsletter, it’s an absolute pleasure to read to you. Yet today, there are more pictures than usual, so I encourage you to listen, if you want, and look at the same time. Just click on the title in the email you received from me and that will take you to the newsletter page.  Listen along and look at the pictures, I promise you’ll be amused, fascinated, and as always find solace in reckoning with our past.<br/><br/>To get to Sarah, we travel to the <a href="https://new.artsmia.org/">Minneapolis Institute of Arts</a>. Did you know that the city of Minneapolis has nearly 7000 acres of parkland?  That’s loads of space for walking, cycling, and wandering around urban lakes.  Just across the street from MIA, as the museum is fondly known, is Washburn Fair Oaks, a small park with grand trees, a small lake, a bridge, and a spectacular view of downtown. Sit on a park bench, look at the grand facade of the museum, take a few deep breaths, and now we’re ready to visit our portrait.<br/><br/>The portrait is in gallery 322, I almost said “she” is in gallery 322, an old habit of familiarizing portraits because when I study them, I often forget that the people are painted. Putting a gender on her begs the provocative question. Allow me to explain that back in the day when I was lecturing on Copley all over the country, often invited to focus on a specific work of art in a collection, I brought everything I had to understand a work in the context of the artist’s career, the circumstances of the subject’s life, the tenor of the times, and what visitors wanted to know now. When I arrived in Minneapolis to talk a
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