iThe Metropolitan Museum of ArtUpper East Side
Ecologies of Painting
A special installation of European paintings (c.1525-1775) by artists including Bruegel and Poussin, examining shifting depictions of humanity's relationship with nature.
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In Bruegel's The Harvesters, a woman stoops to gather wheat that stands as high as the men, and her triangular shape repeats the sheaves until she nearly disappears into the crop. The Met's label is blunt about it: the painting hung in a rich Antwerp merchant's dining room and leaves out how hard the work was.
That is how this one-room show in Gallery 638 works. Ten European paintings from about 1525 to 1775, nine of them the Met's own, with labels built around one idea: nature goes from something people live inside to something they own. Under Tiepolo's ceiling sketch you stand on the stormy sea while Neptune halts the winds overhead. Van der Neer's skaters are on ice from the Little Ice Age; the ones twenty-odd blocks south in Central Park get a refrigerated rink.
It's included with Met admission ($30 for adults, pay what you wish for New York State residents), and the museum is open until 9pm on Fridays and Saturdays.
Look for
The stooping woman in The Harvesters
Look for the woman bent over the wheat in Bruegel's 1565 field: her triangular shape matches the sheaves, so she seems to merge with the crop.
Poussin's blind giant Orion
The giant gropes toward the sunrise while the warm sun pulls water up in vaporous trails to form rain clouds across the landscape.
Frans Post's iguana in Brazil
An iguana sits in the foreground of a Dutch colonial landscape, and the label points out what Post left out: the enslaved Africans working the plantations.
Volaire's erupting Vesuvius
Tiny figures stand silhouetted against glowing lava with Naples beyond, eighteenth-century tourists who came to feel small in front of the volcano.
The Snuffler's forest floor
Marseus van Schrieck, nicknamed for rooting through undergrowth, paints a lizard, a snake, snails and butterflies around a poppy growing wild rather than in a vase.
Good for
- An Hour Or Less
- Evening Visits
- Rainy Days
Skip if
You want a big exhibition: it's one room of ten paintings, nine from the Met's own collection.
With kids
Children 12 and under get into the Met free.
Also at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Image credits
9
- Ecologies of PaintingCourtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Collection in Focus: Modern European CurrentsPhoto: Ariel Ione Williams, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
- Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to NowCourtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Taryn Simon | Father Country I Do Love YouCourtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- The Metropolitan Museum of ArtHugo Schneider, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
- Neue Galerie New YorkFrancesca.hyanna19 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumAjay Suresh, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
- Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design MuseumEpicgenius, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- American Museum of Natural HistoryIngfbruno, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0