The evening’s discussion about the nature of academies was held in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Frank Furness’s great Ruskinian gothic building, which opened in 1876, the year of the Centennial, complete with carved panels showing the benefits of an art school education:-
Inside, I admired the beautiful, early Arts-and-Crafts lamps and the richly carved staircase hall:-
More visual pleasures.
An earthenware Virgin and Child (gift of Henry McIlhenny):-
A fifteenth-century terracotta head:-
St. Anthony (c.1500):-
Hogarth’s Assembly at Wanstead House (1728-31):-
Paul Sandby’s North Terrace at Windsor Castle (c.1775):-
Gainsborough (c.1783):-
I spent what remained of the morning in the John G. Johnson Collection, acquired by a public spirited lawyer in the years after the Civil War, travelling to Europe with P.A.B. Widener, a schoolfriend and seeking advice on his acquisitions from the likes of Berenson and Roger Fry:-
A head of St. John the Baptist:-
A German miserichord:-
A Bernardo Daddi Altarpiece (1334):-
A Botticelli Predella:-
A Crivelli:-
He had a van Eyck of St. Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata:-
We walked up the Rocky steps to the East Entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as fine and confident a statement of beaux arts neoclassicism as it is possible to imagine. The Museum was founded in 1876, the year of the Centennial, the new building first planned in 1907, construction beginning in 1919, and opened on 26 March 1928:-
Back to the Barnes, including the de Chirico portrait of him (1926):-
A very beautiful Cézanne (1892-4):-
Seurat’s Poseuses (1886):-
Cézanne’s Bathers at Rest(1876-7):-
Monet’s Girl with Dog (1873):-
A tiny, little Picasso set of Three Figures (c.1922):-
A very beautiful early Renoir Luncheon(1875):-
Upstairs, beautiful Picasso drawings:-
Toulouse-Lautrec (1886):-
A strangely, but attractively idiosyncratic collection, full of smaller works, and less well known because they haven’t been lent.
I have been trying to get a feel for the geography of downtown Philadelphia, staying as we are on Broad Street, south of the monster City Hall.
I like the local pharmacy on Chestnut Street, designed in 1903 by William L. Price with Arts and Crafts detailing and much admired by Charles Ashbee:-
Nearly opposite is 1515 Chestnut (I can’t find the name of its architect):-
Along the street is an odd, tall, thin building with immensely elongated columns and an inscription A. POMERANTZ & CO, designed by Edward P. Simon and David B. Bassett for Amen Pomerantz’s office outfitting company:-
1606, Chestnut (as you can see):-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 