Gurr-Johns

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Four men and one woman gather around a dead man who is dressed in a bright honey-gold cape and pointed hat, his stone-gray face resting on a stump or column in this dark vertical painting. All the people have peachy skin or light skin tinged with green. Shown from the knees up, Saint Gennaro, the dead man, twists and slumps to our right. On the stump, his eyes are closed and his lips parted. His hands are crossed at his waist and bound with rope. He wears a tall hat rising to a peak in the center. His cloak drapes over a white tunic, and red seeps from around his neck. On our right, a brown-haired woman is shown from the waist up, bending down in front of Saint Gennaro’s face. The light falls across the scene from our right, so her profile is in shadow. She holds a silver chalice in one hand and squeezes something, perhaps a rag or sponge, over the chalice with her other hand. A clean-shaven man with dark curly hair stands behind the stump. That man’s body faces us as he leans to our right and tilts his head down over Saint Gennaro, his shadowed face obscured. His left hand is under the dead man’s head and his right hand clutches his own chest. Behind the dead man and to our left, a bald, gray bearded man bends over and spreads his arms wide over and across the saint’s back. His brow is furrowed, and he looks at Saint Gennaro with deep-set eyes. Along the left edge of the canvas, a bald man with a hooked nose and large ears stands and angles his body to our right, his face in profile. He leans back from the dead man, his right hand holding a knife or sword with a bird-shaped hilt. The fourth man close to Saint Gennaro looks on to our right, from behind the stooping woman. The people gathered around Saint Gennaro wear clothes in muted shades of gray, brown, and white. The edge of a building rises up along the left edge of the composition. In front of a distant mountain to our right, more people are gathered, some with swords raised and others looking on with mouths gaping. One faint head, the face painted in tones of ash gray, peeks over the shoulder of the fourth man. Yellow streaks near the horizon also illuminate the undersides of heavy, dark gray clouds above.
Mattia Preti, The Martyrdom of Saint Gennaro, c. 1685, oil on canvas, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 2000.75.1

The Martyrdom of Saint Gennaro

Mattia Preti · c. 1685 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  2000.75.1

Clouds surge across a steel-blue sky over a gently rippling body of water in this horizontal landscape painting. The horizon comes a quarter of the way up the composition and the water in the bottom quarter is painted with shades of slate blue and gray with pearl-white highlights where the low sun skims across the surface. A rowboat to the left is piled with barrels and six men. A masted sailboat is moored on a sandbar to the right, leaning sharply away from us as three men tend to the hull. Dark gray smoke billows from a flickering orange flame under a long-legged pot farther back on the sandbar. A pier-like structure constructed with thick, weathered logs juts out of the water along the right edge of the composition. One long pole with a barrel impaled on the end reaches more than halfway up the painting. White smoke curls around a three-masted ship farther out in the water, beyond the sandbar, and at least nine sails dot the distant horizon to the left. Sunlight streaks vertically from behind a screen of clouds in the top left corner of the composition, and puffy, pale gray clouds pile against a pale blue sky in the right two-thirds of the painting.
Simon de Vlieger, Estuary at Day's End, c. 1640/1645, oil on panel, Patrons’ Permanent Fund and The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund in memory of Kathrine Dulin Folger, 1997.101.1

Estuary at Day's End

Simon de Vlieger · c. 1640/1645 · oil on panel ·  Accession ID  1997.101.1