The National Gallery of Art has evolved through a unique partnership between the federal government of the United States and the American people. In one of the largest single gifts ever given to a government by a private citizen, Andrew W. Mellon donated his collection to the nation and built a splendid gallery to house it.
Paul Mellon Ailsa Mellon Bruce Rush Harrison Kress Benefactors – Panel 2 Frieda Schiff
Painted in August 1907, Forty-two Kids depicts a band of nude and partially clothed boys engaged in a variety of antics—swimming, diving, sunbathing, smoking, and possibly urinating—on and near a dilapidated wharf jutting out over New York City’s East River. A sharp observer of urban life, George Bellows has sketched his streetwise subjects with characteristic vigor and economy of means, and he has carefully rendered their varied ethnic backgrounds.
Schiff, Bennett. „The Boy Who Chose the Brush over Baseball.“
Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille, ed.
The Dutch and Flemish took extraordinary delight in depictions of the natural world as an expression of God’s everlasting blessing. The flower paintings of Jan Davidsz de Heem celebrate the beauty of flora while at the same time exemplifying the concept of Ars longa, vita brevis (art is long, life is short) embodied in the Dutch still-life paintings of the seventeenth century.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1999: 61-63, no. 16, fig. 55. 2002 Ebert-Schifferer
For this depiction of Joseph spurning the advances of his Egyptian employer’s wife, as recounted in the Book of Genesis, Guercino chose a three-quarter length format that presses the life-sized figures close to the spectator. He has filled the scene with the bed — all rumpled sheets and opulent curtains.
Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille, ed.
Collection of Teresa Heinz [10] See Anna Tummers’s entry on this painting in Sybille Ebert-Schifferer
