Video Resource

From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection

Subject

Duration

16 minutes

Language

Request a DVD

A shrewd businessman, Chester Dale started out as a Wall Street messenger in the early years of the 20th century. By the mid-1920s, he had earned the fortune that enabled him and his wife, Maud, to assemble one of the finest art collections in America.

Chester Dale's gifts to the nation, numbering more than 300 works of art, transformed the collections of the National Gallery of Art.

(closed captioned)

You may also like

A pale-skinned young woman with copper-orange hair, wearing a turquoise-blue robe, stands in a pastel-infused landscape in this stylized, vertical painting. The woman fills most of the left half of the composition. She faces our right in profile with her head bowed as she looks down at the silver and brown box she holds in her right hand, closer to us. Her body angles away from us so we see her back. Her hair is held back under a gold-colored headand, and her blue robe falls over a white skirt. Beyond her, rocky mountains in ice blue and pale lilac purple span the horizon, which comes about three-quarters of the way up the painting, beneath a pale, rose-pink sky. An area of mottled parchment-white to our right of the person could be a field. Along the bottom edge of the canvas, rounded and organic shapes in scarlet red, turquoise, lapis blue, golden and lemon yellow, and pumpkin orange could be abstracted earth or flowers at the woman’s feet.

Educational Resource:  Pandora's Box

Educational Resource:  Edward Hopper Teaching Program Video

Educational Resource:  Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929