More Met

Moving on in the Met, we have paintings by Winslow Homer.  Working in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, Homer appears to have been influenced by the impressionists, without going quite as abstract as some.  He lived in Maine for many years, and knew all the moods of the sea, and depicted them brilliantly.  Here a man in a dismasted dinghy is in a spot of bother, especially with the sharks circling in the gloom.

A nor'easter hits the coast, as depicted by Homer.

Here's a painting of my fav NYC building, the Flatiron!  Painted in 1919, the building had been surpassed by several others as the tallest in town, including the 40 story Woolworth Building, completed circa 1914.  But the Flatiron has flair!

Moving on to old Euro art, here are busts of Julius Caesar (left) and Galba, briefly emperor in AD 68-69 after Nero's demise.  Looks like a WWE staredown to me!

A medieval drinking horn.

A well used helmet.  The museum says it was used either by Byzantines or Ostrogoths circa the 6th/7th centuries AD.  If it could talk, what stories would it tell?  It's interesting that the Byzantines, successors to the Romans, and the Ostrogoths, considered "barbarians" by the Romans, used the same gear.

Suits of armor.  These were made of steel, a fairly scarce commodity in the 16th and 17th centuries.  They weigh 50-70 pounds, maybe a third of the weight of the bloke wearing them, so your potential for making quick moves while so clad was limited.

The horses had their own armor.  Lots of metal clashing.

This was Henry the Eighth's personal armor!  He wore this late in life, when he was portly and plagued by gout.

On to more American art.  This is the famous portrait of George Washington, painted from life by Charles Wilson Peale in 1781.

If the early US government had been a monarchy, Gilbert Stuart would have been the court painter.  He painted Washington many times.  This one is close to the pic on the dollar bill, which was also painted by Stuart.

John Steuart Curry, a Kansan, painted many pictures depicting the dramatic weather of his home state.  Here he combines that (the tornado) with a likeness of John Brown, the ardent anti slavery crusader in the years just before the Civil War.  Brown attempted to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859 as part of a plan to start an armed insurrection to rid the US of slavery.  His raid failed and he was hanged, but the incident helped send the country toward civil war in 1861.  As Curry's painting shows, Brown was a fanatic about his cause.  Southerners hated him; abolitionists loved him.

Here's Washington crossing the Delaware.  We've all seen this painting in books or on TV shows; it resides in the Met.

I liked this bust of Andrew Jackson.  It shows him as he was; one tough mutha.  And that's the way Jackson liked it; he told the sculptor to be realistic and honest.