Provenance

Victor G. Fischer

active 1912

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Shown from the hips up, a pale-skinned woman with a long, narrow face wears a richly decorated crimson-red dress in this vertical portrait painting. Her body angles to our left, and she looks in that direction with hooded brown eyes. She has a long nose, a pointed chin, and her pink lips are closed. Deep indentations at her temples and the hollows of her cheeks are shadowed. Her brown hair is parted down the middle and held back in a gold net. Large pearls hang from her ears, and a long strand of pearls doubled around her neck look white at her collar and gray down by her waist. The bodice of her dress is patterned with marigold orange and wine red, and translucent white lace covers her chest and flares up the sides of her neck. A heavy outer garment has black stripes decorated with gold leafy designs alternating with ruby-red stripes. The seams are studded with pearls down the front and along the split sleeves. A gray cuff lines the wrist of a bare, long-fingered hand, which rests across the other forearm. She wears a leather-brown glove on the other hand and clutches a white cloth in that fist. She sits on a pine-green cushion, and an apple-red curtain falls in gentle folds across the background.
Agnolo Bronzino, Eleonora di Toledo, c. 1560, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.7

Eleonora di Toledo

Agnolo Bronzino · c. 1560 · oil on panel ·  Accession ID  1961.9.7

We look across choppy waves at a sailboat canting at a sharp angle, with several others floating nearby or in the distance, all beneath a sky filled with charcoal-gray clouds in this horizontal painting. In the bottom third of the canvas, the battleship-gray waves are topped with frothy white crests. The boat closest to us is slightly left of center, and its mast tips wildly to our right. Sunlight catches the straw-yellow sail as it pulls taut in the wind. At least two men crouch or bend over in the wooden vessel below, as white spray kicks up off the far side of the boat. Two white seagulls, tiny in scale, fly closer to the water’s surface to our left of that boat. The next closest vessel is to our right, and it is nearly swallowed in shadow. Two men huddle at one pointed end of the narrow boat, and a crimson-red sail flaps loosely in the wind. At least four more boats in the distance, along to the horizon, range in size from a small sailboat to a three-masted ship. The sail of the smallest boat also tips sharply to our right, but the tall masts of the ship are upright, and those sails are furled. Dark clouds billow up from the horizon, but break near the upper left corner. The sky beyond is pale apricot peach, and a few streaks of light reach the water’s surface.
Willem van de Velde the Younger, After the Storm, c. 1700, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (William A. Clark Collection, 1926), 2016.22.7

After the Storm

Willem van de Velde the Younger · c. 1700 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  2016.22.7