Meintest du oliver?
This tour offers vivid descriptions of specific works on view in the East Building. Though designed for people with vision loss, this tour is a useful tool for guided looking for all visitors.
left arm stretches forward with her first two fingers extended; she cradles an olive
Van Gogh arrived in Arles in February 1888, the landscape covered with snow. But it was sun that he sought in Provence—a brilliant light that would wash out detail and simplify forms, reducing the world around him to the kinds of flat patterns he admired in Japanese woodblock prints.
dtische Galerie, Frankfurt, 2019 – 2020, no. 19, repro. 2021 Van Gogh and the Olive
Both this panel of Ginevra Bentivoglio and the companion portrait of her husband, Giovanni II Bentivoglio, also in the National Gallery of Art, were created when the family was at the height of its power. Giovanni, a major political figure in northern Italy, ruled the city of Bologna from 1463 until his expulsion for tyranny in 1506.
A marine-blue cloth with an olive-green lining nearly fills the background beyond
It was 1950 before the Catholic Church accepted the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven as official dogma, but the notion had long been part of her legend and a subject for artists. One of the earliest large-scale depictions of this event in Italy was a rose window in the cathedral of Siena, designed by Duccio around 1288.
Beyond the box and people, and between them and Mary above, a person kneels on an olive-green
Fleeing the violence of the American Revolution, John Singleton Copley and his family settled in London in 1775. While Copley (standing at top left) tried to remain neutral, his father-in-law Richard Clarke (seated in front of the artist) supported the British.
His forearms rest on a low, olive-green stone column in front of him, his hands crossed
Orazio Gentileschi was one of the earliest and most gifted painters to be inspired by the genre scenes of Caravaggio in Rome. Here, he must have had in mind Caravaggio’s famous picture on the same theme.
In front of her, the table is draped with fringed, olive-green fabric.
Meindert Hobbema studied under the noted landscape artist Jacob van Ruisdael, and quite a few of his compositions evolved from the work of his erstwhile master. Hobbema approached nature in a straightforward manner, depicting picturesque, rural scenery enlivened by the presence of peasants or hunters.
The ground and stream closest to us are painted in tones of olive green, sepia and
Wendy MacNaughton takes us on a journey to meet the legendary Harlem artist known for his collages — and reflect on our own homes and families.
Dorothea Lange, Untitled image (sharecropper house on dirt near Olive Hill, North
This Coronation of the Virgin may be the first time the subject, which originated in the West, appears in Venetian art. Some of the earliest representations were carved above cathedral doorways in France—and certain elements in the Gallery’s painting—its elaborate halos, for example—share in the decorative elegance of Gothic art.
They both sit on an olive-green cushion on the gold throne.
No one parties like the gods—at least not like the mythological ones in this painting, a collaboration by the Renaissance artists Giovanni Bellini and Titian. The picture was the first in a series of bacchanals commissioned by Duke Alfonso d’Este to decorate the camerino d’alabastro (alabaster study) of his castle in Ferrara.
The two satyrs have men’s torsos and furry goat’s legs, and they have darker, olive
