One of the Impressionist treasures of the Carnegie Museum of Art.
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Cliffs Near Dieppe, by Claude Monet
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A Rainy Day? Let’s Visit the Museum
A rainy November afternoon is the perfect time to spend an hour or two in the art museum. Here are a few of the things you might see if you visited the Carnegie right now.
Aurora Leigh, by John White Alexander, 1904: an imaginative portrait of the heroine of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel. Alexander’s last and greatest work was the decoration of the Grand Staircase in the Carnegie, so you’ll have a chance to see those murals, too.
Sunrise Synchromy in Violet, by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, 1918.
Rue de L’Abreuvoir, by Maurice Utrillo, 1911.
Harbor Mole, by Lionel Feininger, 1923.
Rue de Beaujour, Pontoise, by Camille Pissarro, 1872.
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Young Women Picking Fruit, by Mary Cassatt
“No woman has a right to draw like that,” said her friend Edgar Degas when he saw this painting—a compliment Mary Cassatt remembered for years. Mary Cassatt was born in 1844 in Allegheny (now the North Side of Pittsburgh) and grew up there. She studied art in Philadelphia for a while, but spent most of her life in France after that—although it is to the honor of Pittsburgh’s cultured citizens that, when she had to come back to America for a while, one of the first people to recognize Cassatt’s talent and give her a professional commission was Michael Domenec, the Roman Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh.
This painting is one of the treasures of the Carnegie Museum of Art, whose collection of Impressionists is worth traveling a long way to see.
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The Elgin Plasters
Dionysus, Demeter, and Kore. Ever since Lord Elgin bought the Parthenon sculptures and other bric-a-brac on eBay in the early 1800s, there have been debates about whether the Turks had any right to sell them, and whether they really ought to be where they are (in the British Museum), or whether they ought to be back in Athens. The arguments are still going on, and the United Nations has tried to sort out the dispute to no avail.
But here they are in Pittsburgh, and no one has to have a fight about it, because these are plaster casts of the originals. They are almost indistinguishable visually from the original art, and they can be experienced in three dimensions like the originals, and you don’t have to cross the Atlantic to see them.
In the late 1800s, the world’s great museums had the idea that it would be good for people to be able to experience the great sculpture and architecture of the world in three dimensions, just as if it were in their own city. The craft of making plaster casts had been brought to a peak of perfection, and museums eagerly bought up these casts and formed large collections.
Then, as the twentieth century rolled on, the collections became mortal embarrassments. Art was valuable only if it was original, and plaster casts are not original. Only three of the great plaster-cast collections survive, and this is one of them. It is the only one that was never kicked out of its original home.
Museum curators are beginning to wake up to the value of these collections. From a visual point of view, the experience of viewing them is almost exactly the same as the experience of viewing the originals. An art student can sketch them from different angles, can observe how the shadows fall across the drapery, can crane her neck to look at the bits that aren’t visible in photographs.
Artemis. Father Pitt is sure that someone, somewhere, can find a reason for being angry about these plaster casts. But for most sane people, here are some of the remaining glories of classical art for you to enjoy guilt-free and without a passport.
Hestia, whose usual epithet in Hesiod was Please Do Not Touch.
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The Baptism of Fire
Pittsburgh After the Fire from Boyd’s Hill, by William C. Wall, 1845. In the Carnegie Museum of Art. “Every year, on the 10th day of April, the fire-bells ring out the number 1-8-4-5, in memory of the baptism of fire that comes, sooner or later, to nearly every city. Like all great disasters of this kind, the origin was trifling. While the loyal but noisy fire-cracker decorates the historical shield of the fire department of Portland, Maine, and the combination of a kicking cow and a coal-oil lamp that of Chicago, the homely but useful wash-boiler stands as a reminder of the greatest disaster that has ever fallen on Pittsburgh. Early in the morning of the 10th of April, I845, an extra hot fire under a wash-boiler, in a poor tenement at the corner of Ferry street and Second street, now second avenue, started a fire which, for lack of water, was soon beyond the control of the fire department. A high wind carried the burning fire-brands over the different portions of the city, and in a few hours one-third of the geographical extent of the city and two-thirds of its value, was only a mass of charred cinders. The estimated loss was from six to eight million dollars, while twelve thousand people, most of whom had been in good circumstances, were rendered homeless. Fortunately but two persons lost their lives, one being Mr. Samuel Kingston, and the other Mrs. Malone. This was a severe blow to the business interests of the city, but with remarkable pluck the work of rebuilding was begun at once. The most liberal settlements were made by those having goods here on commission, generous aid was extended to the sufferers, and the city rallied rapidly from what otherwise would have been its death knell.”
—The Illustrated Guide and Handbook of Pittsburgh and Allegheny (1887), p. 20.
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Stained Glass in the Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum
“America the Beautiful,” by Katherine Lee Bates. The Allegheny Cemetery Mausoleum is now advertised as the Temple of Memories, because our taste has gone in that direction. It’s a very large communal mausoleum, built in 1960, and walking through the doors feels like going through a time portal into the end of the Eisenhower era. By far the most striking feature of the mausoleum is the series of stained-glass windows by Willet in Philadelphia and Hunt in Pittsburgh. They are some of the best modern stained glass in Pittsburgh, and they commemorate great triumphs of religious literature and music. We have a lot of large pictures here, so we’ll put them behind a “read more” link to avoid weighing down the front page.
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Cy Hungerford on the Sacco-Vanzetti Case
Cy Hungerford was a Pittsburgh legend. He drew editorial cartoons for more than seventy years, fifty of those years for the Post-Gazette. In this cartoon from August 11, 1927, he depicts poor Uncle Sam walking a tightrope labeled “The Sacco-Vanzetti Case” over Niagara Falls. Old Pa Pitt took this cartoon from a microfilm archive and cleaned it up quite a bit, so that it looks more like Hungerford’s original drawing and less like a scratched and grubby microfilm. It is out of copyright in the United States, so anyone can use it. In countries where copyright depends on the life of the author, be aware that Hungerford lived till 1983. It is very unlikely that his estate will worry about someone using his cartoons in Luxembourg or Malaysia, but old Pa Pitt, who is based in the United States, is not responsible for foreign copyright laws.
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Domestic Stained Glass in Beechview
A stained-glass window in an early-twentieth-century house in Beechview. Stained glass like this was especially popular between about 1890 and 1920, just when the streetcar suburbs that later became city neighborhoods were mushrooming. These windows are often stolen if the house is vacant for a while, but even so thousands still decorate houses all around the city.
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A Medieval Fantasy
A little experiment in digital art. It began with a photograph of one of the Gothic gateposts outside the chancery behind St. Paul’s Cathedral in Oakland. That was made black and white, and then put through a multiple-layer “etching” filter, and then every detail that looked at all modern was scribbled over. This is the result. Was it worth the work? Probably not, but one can always learn something from these experiments.
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Dressing for the Masquerade, by Edward Trumbull
Here is another illustration by the talented painter Edward Trumbull from an advertisement for the Standard Sanitary Mfg. Co. of Pittsburgh. Trumbull’s thought seems to have been that he didn’t need to render the bathroom itself appealing to sell plumbing fixtures; in fact, the bathroom is seen only through a curtained doorway. Instead, his pictures suggest that the plumbing fixtures are an essential part of a life that is much more colorful and exciting than the life you live, and perhaps your life could be just as delightful if you only had “Standard” plumbing fixtures.
