Samurai and Baseball

 I'm in Japan for twelve days or so.

Koshun Masunaga is a noted calligrapher in Tokyo.  She exhibited some of her works, including several commissioned posters for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.  In front of us, she filled a sheet with calligraphic art about Japanese star baseball player Shohei Ohtani, a rare pitcher-hitter for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

I like these Samurai warriors. 

Soft

 

In the guest room set up for granddaughter visits.

The October 1 theme for City Daily Photo participants is "soft."  Click here for other interpretations.

Lyndhurst Mansion and Gardens

 Last week I went to Irvington, New York, and toured Lyndhurst.  

Lyndhurst was built in 1838 by General William Paulding, a former New York City mayor who had grown up in Tarrytown and wanted to go home.  He bought 180 acres of farmland for $20,000 and turned it into land for a manor.  Lyndhurst was designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, a prominent architect at that time.

Paulding's furnishings are relatively spare.

The second owner was George Merritt, a merchant and inventor, who re-engaged Davis.  Merritt and Davis doubled the size of the manor and turned it into the Romantic Gothic Revival showpiece it is today.  Busts of George Washington (above) and Lafayette line the formal entrance.

In 1880 Jay Gould bought the property.  Gould was a railroad magnate and one of the wealthiest people in the country.  He did not modify the structure, but he added opulent art and furnishings.  

Gould's art gallery is impressive.  One end is a huge glass window by Gould's friend, Louis Comfort Tiffany.  Regrettably my photograph of the wall didn't do it justice, so I don't show it here.

Lyndhurst has a broad view of the Hudson River.

Gould died in 1892, but his daughters owned and seasonally occupied the property until 1961.  In that year Gould's daughter, Anna Gould, donated the estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which owns it today and opens it for tours.

Mark Twain House

Samuel Clemens -- known to most by his pen name Mark Twain -- lived in Hartford for 17 years, from 1874 to 1891.  He wrote his best known books here -- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

His house was designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter and built in the America High Gothic style. Clemens biographer Justin Kaplan called it "part steamboat, part medieval fortress and part cuckoo clock."

Clemens bought land for the house in a neighborhood called Nook Farm, a small writers' colony in which the best known author in today's world was his next door neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Louis Comfort Tiffany decorated several of the 25 rooms in the days before he shifted to concentrate exclusively on his glass works.

The Foundation that operates the Mark Twain House conducts several tours a day, seven days a week.  My family took a tour led by a woman who assumed the role of Clemens' wife Olivia.  Photographs are not permitted inside the house.

A Tall Hartford Mural

This is Reach, an eight story tall mural by ARCY, behind the TheaterWorks building in downtown Hartford.  

 

ARCY describes the meaning of the mural as follows:  "the low bearing fruit may be easy to attain, but to reach beyond demonstrates the will to persevere, to never settle for less than your potential, and to always follow your dreams, no matter how high they are."

ARCY is New Haven-based artist Ryan Christenson, who has been painting murals worldwide over 20 years.  (ARCY is a play on his initials RC.)  ARCY was supported in this project by the Greater Hartford Arts Council, Theater Works and CT Murals.

This post is linked to Monday Murals.

Some gems at Wadsworth Atheneum

 Here are some of the amazing paintings at Wadsworth Atheneum.

A special surrealist painting by Salvador Dali.  The central image is either a chalice or a face.  

Vincent Van Gogh was fascinated with painting himself.  He did it numerous times over his brief career.

John Singleton Copley was a superb portrait artist.  This portrait of Bridget Forrester Foot always catches my eye because it shows us a not overly attractive woman just the way she must have looked.

Gilbert Stuart is famous because of his portraits of George Washington.  I liked seeing his painting of a different man, in this case James Heath.

Marsden Hartley painted this image of Military a year before the start of World War I.  As the nearby label wrote, "Here, numbers, bold shapes, and vivid colors evoke the sights and sounds of military music and parades. You don't just see the rhythm; you can hear it.  Military turns paint into music, line into movement."

This isn't a work by an artist famous today, but it is the kind of painting one can spend time admiring.  Giovanni Paolo Panini was a Roman artist who painted The Picture Gallery of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, a huge work, in the middle of the 16th century.

Charter Oak at Wadsworth Atheneum

The Charter Oak was an exceptionally large oak tree growing in Hartford from around the 12th or 13th century until it fell during a storm in 1856.  Connecticut colonists hid Connecticut's Royal Charter of 1662 within the tree's hollow to thwart its confiscation by Sir Edmund Andros.  

After the Charter Oak fell, pieces of it were gathered and turned into a variety of pieces.  This chair at Wadsworth Atheneum is said to be constructed from the Charter Oak.  A painting of the Charter Oak is visible behind the chair.  The painting's frame is also said to be from pieces of the fallen tree.

The gunmaker Samuel Colt was a wealthy Hartford businessman when the Charter Oak fell.  He had a bassinet crafted from the Charter Oak.  (See the colts atop the supports?)  It is said that Colt's three children swung in this bassinet when they were babies.