a trip to the met

The other day, I met Matt for lunch and then went up to the Met to see the Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun exhibit. It had been up for two months and was closing that weekend, so it was time to finally see it! On the way, I walked through Central Park - somehow, I went through an area I'd never been through before, even though I'd passed it by a million times. It's right behind the theater where they have Shakespeare in the Park (this year, we will somehow get tickets!!). It's a Shakespeare Garden, and it was really pretty! I know there are a million little places like this in Central Park that I haven't seen, but it's still fun to discover new places.















It was a drizzly day, but it made the park look even nicer! And the city streets looked good, too - I really like it here when it rains.











I headed straight for the Vigeé Le Brun exhibit - but no photos were allowed inside, so the picture of the entrance will have to do! It was a really nice exhibit, a lot larger than I expected. I studied her work in art history classes in college, but had never seen any of it in person before. She was Marie Antoinette's portrait painter, and was friends with a lot of her royal friends. There was one set of paintings that I really liked - one was a portrait of the queen wearing casual, peasant style clothes, holding a rose. It was right next to another, very similar portrait of the queen wearing very fancy royal clothes, holding the same rose. It turns out that the portrait with the casual clothes was shown in a salon and caused such an outrage because of how casually the queen was portrayed that she had to quickly repaint the portrait with fancy clothes. Seeing them next to each other was really interesting - it was nearly the exact same face and background, just that one was regal and one was bucolic. Anyway, after seeing lots of paintings of wide eyed children and women and fancy dresses and ringlets and powdered wigs, I'd had enough rococo sweetness and walked around the rest of the museum a bit.









Then, it was time to go! Back out into the drizzle (it cleared up). Did you know that the Met recently opened a whole new building? It's called the Met Breuer, and it's in what used to house the Whitney, not too far away. It's more focused on modern art and there's an exhibit up right now called Unfinished that I really want to see! Maybe I'll have to meet up with Matt again for lunch?