In addition to answering specific questions, the ASK team enjoys recommending works of art based on

In addition to answering specific questions, the ASK team enjoys recommending works of art based on visitors’ interests or even on current events. In honor of the last official day of summer, I’ve been suggesting a stop at Florine Stettheimer’s Heat in the #BKMAmericanart galleries.Heat shows the five women of the cultured and artistic Stettheimer family arranged in a loosely circular composition. Mother Rosetta appears at the top in a black dress, and she’s accompanied by her four daughters: Stella (also in black), Carrie (in yellow), Ettie (in flowered pink) and Florine herself (in white). All five women droop in the oppressive summer weather, and so do the branches of the willow trees behind them and the cherry blossoms in a vase on the table.Stettheimer painted Heat to commemorate the summer of 1918, which the family spent at a rented country house in Bedford Hills, New York. Although she was inspired by a specific date and occasion—her mother’s birthday, as noted on the cake at the bottom!—time and place are ambiguous in this scene. The Westchester landscape is flattened and abstracted into three broad fields of intense color and the Stettheimer sisters appear ageless, or at least much younger than they really were in 1918.Next time you’re in this gallery of “American Identities”, visit the Stettheimer women and spend a few minutes thinking about the different ways that portraits can capture personalities, relationships, and memories. Nearby in the same room, two other paintings of sisters—Thomas Eakins’s Home Scene and Rembrandt Peale’s The Sisters (Eleanor and Rosalba Peale)—offer interesting comparisons for any season.Posted by Jessica Murphy -- source link

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