Father Pitt

Category: Sculpture

  • Hebe Among the Orchids

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    Hebe, Greek goddess of youth, cupbearer of Olympus, stands among the Phalaenopsis orchids in the Sunken Garden at Phipps Conservatory.

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  • Shakespeare at Work

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    William Shakespeare hard at work on something brilliant. One of the larger-than-life Noble Quartet in front of the Carnegie in Oakland, Shakespeare represents Literature (along with Michelangelo for Art, Bach for Music, and Newton for Science). The picture was taken with a cheap toy digital camera, then turned to grayscale because the cheap digital colors were just awful.

  • The Puddler

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    Made entirely of glass, this art-deco mural, or sculpture, shows a “puddler,” a man who stirs the molten iron ore until it’s tasty enough to make good steel. The location should be obvious from the photograph, but note that the Puddler himself is around the corner over the Wood Street entrance.

  • Complementary Masses

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    An abstract sculpture in front of the Carnegie Museum of Art perfectly complements the mass of the Cathedral of Learning in the background. This photograph was taken a few years ago, when the Cathedral of Learning still proudly bore its coat of soot from the age of heavy industry.

  • A Lion in Mellon Park

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    A lion in Mellon Park guards a formal green.

  • Wrought Iron in Mellon Park

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    A wrought-iron fence and gate in Mellon Park, surrounded by the rich and subtle colors of early November.

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  • A Fountain in Mellon Park

    Early November: the gaudy colors of the maples have fled, but the oaks and birches take over with richer and subtler tones. This fountain is a bit medieval, a bit magical, and a bit silly, which makes it just about perfect.

  • The Westinghouse Memorial

    Father Pitt thinks the Westinghouse Memorial in Schenley Park is the most effective memorial in Pittsburgh. Instead of a heroic statue of the great inventor George Westinghouse, what we see is a boy, representing the youth of the future, learning about Westinghouse’s accomplishments. Because of Westinghouse, we have safe high-speed travel and electricity in our homes, and many other astonishing things we take for granted today. Thousands of Westinghouse employees, who remembered the founder fondly, donated their own money to keep his memory alive. These pictures, which show only a small part of the memorial, were taken with a Kodak Tourist camera, a simple and very common folding camera that, like many other Kodak cameras of the time, has good optics and a reliable mechanism.

  • Robert Burns Fans: Here’s Your Wallpaper

    Andrew Carnegie and a number of other wealthy poetry-lovers gave us this statue of Robert Burns, which stands in Schenley Park on the grounds of Phipps Conservatory, just at the end of the Panther Hollow Bridge. So I’ve made it into a perfect computer wallpaper for Burns fans everywhere. The wallpaper comes in three different proportions; click on each image for the full-scale version.

    The 1600 x 1200 version can be rescaled to fit 1280 x 960, 1024 x 768, 800 x 600, 640 x 480, or any other 4-to-3 display.

    The 1680 x 1060 version can be scaled to fit widescreen displays.

    The 1280 x 1024 version fits most last-generation CRT monitors at their highest resolution.

  • Spring at Phipps

    The Spring Flower Show at Phipps Conservatory had a whimsically classical theme: Praxiteles by way of Salvador Dali.