The Solace Project #17
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Dear Friends,<br/><br/>This week, a close look at <a href="https://www.timkenmuseum.org/collection/mrs-thomas-gage/#info-1">the stunning portrait of Margaret Kemble Gage</a> at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego, this time with feeling. When he painted it in 1771, John Singleton Copley wrote to his brother: “It is I think, beyand Compare the best Lady’s portrait I ever Drew.”  <br/><br/>Before we venture to San Diego, where the portrait hangs, I wanted to share some very exciting news. Just this week I learned that <a href="https://crystalbridges.org/">Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art</a> has just named me as Distinguished Scholar for 2021, as I look backwards and forwards at my own past scholarship on early American art.  The position feels like a validation of precisely what I’ve been doing on this newsletter--close looking, adding historical data, thinking again. As if I needed reinvigoration of my already high energy for exploring the past through pictures! I’m truly excited. The focal point of my appointment is the inaugural <a href="https://crystalbridges.org/reports-and-research/tyson-scholars/tyson-think-tank/">Tyson Think Tank,</a> a one-month deep dive reexamining early American art with new eyes—works painted by white artists for white audiences and patrons and collected by museums and taught in schools as an exclusive canon. My favorite part is that the work requires looking at actual works of art. Theory and practice attached to specific paintings, anchors to ground our conversations. I’ll be focusing on Copley’s portrait of <a href="https://collection.crystalbridges.org/objects/190/mrs-theodore-atkinson-jr-frances-deering-wentworth?ctx=ba318f9d013f78d4afa3ecdea25a21e144fc22b8&idx=0">Frances Deering Atkinson</a> of 1765. More on her situation later this year. I’ll be studying in a sort of lab format, with a group of fellows on the same project, each with a different work of art, and surrounded by museum staff members, c
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serenaM
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