Run Like a Mother

 Ridgefield's very popular 3K race takes place on Mother's Day.

A recently ten year old granddaughter qualified for the race by one day.  She found a friend to run with.

Three generations ran past.

Two fairies follow the last runners to indicate that the race is over.

Mark Twain House

 I wrote yesterday about Ron Chernow's new biography about Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens. I passed through Hartford last week, so I detoured for a quick photograph of the Mark Twain House, designed in 1873 by New York architect Edward Tuckerman Potter.

Clemens and his family lived in Hartford from 1874 to 1891.  While living in Hartford, he wrote such works as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Clemens biographer Justin Kaplan called the house "part steamboat, part medieval fortress and part cuckoo clock."  Around the house Clemens had rambling porches built like riverboat decks.  

I bought Chernow's book yesterday.  It is 1,033 pages.  There go my hopes of reading anything else this summer.

Mark Twain

The prolific biographer Ron Chernow is releasing his new biography, Mark Twain, today.

Twain was born and raised in Missouri but he lived in Connecticut for much of his adult life.  Twain and his family lived in Hartford for 20 years, from 1871 through 1891, in a grand house I have shown before. many times, including here, just one week after I started this blog.

When Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain turned 70 in 1905, he began to consider where and how he would make his exit. Twain purchased over 230 acres of land in Redding, Connecticut, on the advice of his friend and biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, and engaged John Howells to design a home. Howells created a version of the Italian villa suited to the Connecticut climate and landscape.

Redding is home to the Mark Twain Library, founded in 1908 by Clemens.  He moved into his new home, Stormfield, in the same year and lived there until his death in 1910.  (The house was for sale and passed into the hands of new owners in 2023 . . . here is a video if you want to spend five minutes imagining yourself living in Mark Twain's Redding home.)

 

The library has a design model of an intended sculpture by Walter Russell, showing Twain with characters from his many books.  Russell intended to construct the full-sized statues in a memorial garden, but in the Depression of the 1930s the funds could not be raised.

Ron Chernow is on a tour promoting his new book about Twain.  He is scheduled to appear in Hartford and later in Redding in June, but unfortunately I have other commitments during that time, so I won't be able to attend his talks.  But, I will get the book.

The Capitol

 

The Rhode Island Capitol, Providence, Rhode Island.

Mother's Day

 

Happy Mother's Day.

Yale University Art Gallery

 What a place!  Beautiful pieces from every period, every country and every medium.

A room full of classical Roman and Greek busts.  Marcus Aurelius is in the center, from ~147 A.D.

In another room, Gustav Courbet's 1875 bronze bust, La Liberte, is the focal point.

This lustrous marble Sienese bust is by Giuseppe Mazzuoli and is from ~1690 - 1700.  It portrays a member of the Chigi Family, possibly Francesco Chigi Piccolomini (1650-1720)

I love these glazed earthenware animals -- a horse and two camels -- from China.  They are from the Tang dynasty (618-907 A.D.  Years ago I had two small horses like this, which I am sure were reproductions.

This is a beautiful room loaded with American paintings.

Yale Center of British Art

 I visited the Yale Center of British Art, which opened recently after being closed for two years for a major conservation program.  Much of the permanent collection was donated by Paul Mellon, a wealthy Yale graduate.  The building was designed by the internationally acclaimed American architect Louis I. Kahn. 

The building opened in 1977, shortly after Kahn's death.  The interior offers interesting contrasts of natural materials such as white oak, concrete, travertine marble and Belgian linen.

It has the biggest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom.

There is currently a special exhibition of works by J.M.W. Turner through July 27.

‘Dort, or Dordrecht: the Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed’ (1818) is one of the featured works.

The Long Hall on the top floor shows tightly packed works from the permanent collection.   There are no labels beside the works.  At each end of the hall there are catalogs to borrow, but I found it hard to match the works on the wall with the catalog descriptions.

I looked at William Hogarth's self-portrait for a while.  If I strip way the wig, he looks like a regular guy, the kind of person who might be a friend or whom you might stand next to at a baseball game.

Next to Hogarth's self-portrait is his portrait of William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, later fourth Duke of Devonshire.  While Hogarth looks so normal, Cavendish looks like a cartoon of a foppish narcissist who is a product of upper class in-breeding.

One of the most powerful works in the collection is this mid-18th century Bust of a Man by Francis Harwood.  Coming from a time when most Africans in Europe and America were enslaved, this bust shows a strong and dignified man.