{"id":2603,"date":"2026-06-01T15:10:56","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T15:10:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/?p=2603"},"modified":"2026-06-01T15:14:47","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T15:14:47","slug":"frederic-church-boston-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/?p=2603","title":{"rendered":"Frederic Church & Boston Trip"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Vermont Update<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Ambiana has been home all week and on Sunday Night I beat her and Colleen at Scrabble. Jakobi meanwhile qualified for the New England track Meet next Saturday by placing 6th in pole vault! She is so happy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Frederic Church in Vermont”<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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On my Thursday delivery route to Middlebury Vermont I took a break and visited the Frederic Church in Vermont exhibit at the Middlebury College of Art. This year is the anniversary of Frederic Church’s birth and this show highlights the sketches and paintings he made in his many trips to our state. The museaum was free and very nice. I spent about an hour checking out the line drawings and paintings. In August I am going to vist Church’s home Olana in New York where they too are mounting a special exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The following are the paiontings that were on view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back to Boston<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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On Saturday I traveled alone to Boston to see a musical and to finish looking at all the rocks in the rock room at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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These are some of my favorite rocks that I saw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I took lots of close ups that look like alien landscapes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I winder what made these river-like squiggles in this fossilized ammniote?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I purchased these polished ammonite fossils in the gift shop to add to my ammonite collection. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harvard Fogg Museum of Art<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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I had some time before meeting my friend Laila for dinner so I walked over to the Harvard Art Museum to see the one Frederic Church painting they had on view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Frederic Edwin Church American (Hartford, Conn. 1826-1900 New York) Our Banner in the Sky, 1861 Oil over lithograph on paper, laid down on card<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Within this vibrant scene of atmospheric flux, an opening within a roiling cloud layer reveals stars against a blue firmament. The barren tree in the foreground doubles as a pole for this celestial apparition of the “broad stripes and bright stars” of the U.S. flag. Following the rapid succession of political provocations that led to Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter, Church channeled his belief in the divine righteousness of the Union cause into this patriotic visual spectacle.As the sectarian conflict stretched from weeks into months, the oil sketch, with its allegorical river valley resembling the Catskills and the Hudson River, was translated into a popular chromolithograph. The prints were issued by the New York branch of Goupil & Cie as a subscription fundraiser to support the families of Union soldiers. This is one of the few lithographs from the series that Church painted by hand.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“This painting is a masterful representation of the American West, capturing the awe-inspiring grandeur and sublime beauty of the untamed frontier. Created by Albert Bierstadt in 1863, the artwork presents a dramatic, idealized vision of the Rocky Mountains, centered around the towering presence of Lander’s Peak. Bierstadt masterfully uses dramatic chiaroscuro, showing celestial shafts of sunlight breaking through dark, turbulent clouds to illuminate a pristine valley, a cascading waterfall, and a serene lake. The landscape is rich with detail, seamlessly blending the massive, rugged scale of the mountain peaks with the delicate textures of the foreground forests and rocky terrain. Beyond its breathtaking aesthetic appeal, the painting serves as a powerful historical document of nineteenth-century American optimism and the ideology of Manifest Destiny, depicting the vast wilderness as both a sacred sanctuary and a land of boundless, divinely favored promise.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jehan Georges Vibert French, 1840-1902 Apotheosis of Louis-Adolphe Thiers<\/strong>, c. 1878<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Shrouded in the French flag and surrounded by symbols of national grief, Louis-Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877), president of the Third French Republic, lies in state. To his left, a mourning figure repre- senting France bows her head, while to the right, a nude, winged figure of victory gestures toward the glorified wars of the past unfolding in the heavens. The allegorical composition was disparaged by several critics at the time, reflecting the ambivalence surrounding Thiers’s legacy because of his brutal suppression of the Paris Commune uprising (March-May 1871). This is a smaller, grisaille version (painted in shades of gray) of the colorful painting that was exhibited at the Salon of 1878. Vibert was a painter, printmaker, and amateur photographer, and the unique American frame surrounding his painting underscores its playful mimicry of reproducible media. Constructed in New York in the 1890s, the frame is an enlarged version of the “shadow box” frames that collectors used to exhibit daguerreotypes and other works on paper in their homes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Claude Monet\u2019s Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare<\/strong><\/em> captures the dynamic energy and technological optimization of late 19th-century Paris. Painted in 1877, the artwork showcases an incoming steam locomotive engulfed in dense clouds of white and blue smoke beneath the vast iron-and-glass canopy of the station. Rather than focusing on clear, literal details, Monet uses quick, loose brushstrokes to emphasize the fleeting interplay of light, atmosphere, and industrial grit. The towering glass structure dissolves into the haze, blending the mechanical power of the trains with the shifting environment around them. This piece serves as a definitive masterpiece of Impressionism, celebrating modern urban life through a focus on sensory perception and atmospheric movement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin (1888)<\/strong> is a striking work born from an artistic exchange between two master Post-Impressionists. Painted in Arles, France, Van Gogh depicted himself with severely cropped hair and ascetic features, intentionally evoking the image of a Buddhist monk to symbolize a shared spiritual devotion to art. The portrait is defined by its vibrant, flat emerald-green background and intense, rapid brushstrokes that convey psychological depth. Van Gogh sent this painting to Gauguin as part of a traditional artist swap, aiming to establish an egalitarian art colony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Franz Marc German (Munich 1880-1916) Grazing Horses IV (The Red Horses), <\/strong>1911<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1911, deep in discussions with other members of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter and preoccupied with questions of color, Marc began work on Grazing Horses IV. Wishing to give form to inner experience and to free himself from formal constraints imposed by the outside world, he aimed to detach color from its descriptive fun- ction and assigned each primary color a specific symbolic value. As this painting’s numeric title suggests, Marc returned repeatedly to the horse as a subject. He became well known for his pre- occupation with animals, seeing them as the embodiment of a better, purer world, the bringers of spiritual renewal to western culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Edvard Munch Train Smoke<\/strong>, 1910<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although it may come as a surprise to those familiar with Munch’s iconic imagery, most of the artist’s paintings are life studies, portraits, and landscapes. He typically painted these works outdoors, in locations he chose deliberately, as he did in this case. He captured this view of a train traversing the edge of the Oslo fjord to high- light the country’s increasing i. ndustrializationMunch frequently returned to earlier motifs; this is the second version of this composition, made after he sold the first. Here Munch used a coarse canvas and applied the paint in short strokes of thick impasto, which he scrubbed vigorously in zigzags and streaks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Franz von Stuck Wounded Amazon<\/strong>, 1905 and Amazon<\/strong>, 1897 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As both a founder of the Munich Secession and an influential teacher at the city’s Royal Academy (where his students included Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky), Franz von Stuck was a central figure in Munich’s art world at the turn of the 20th century. His modern interpretation of the antique in works such as this sculpture and painting brought him particular success. Wounded Amazon depicts a battle between Amazons and centaurs; the subject is not found in classical mythology but is of the artist’s own invention. Though he was clearly influenced by the antiquities in Munich’s Glyptothek museum, Stuck based the painting on photographic studies of a model posed in his studio. Ever since he had featured the goddess Athena on the poster for the first Munich Secession exhibition in 1893, classical female warriors had appeared in his work as symbols of the new art. There are two other versions of this painting, and the artist eventually produced three life-sized versions of the sculpture. One was installed outside Villa Stuck, the home he had designed for himself in Munich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Boston Meteor Explosion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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After the Art Museum I met my friend Laila for dinner and she told me about hearing a meteor explode over Boston around 2pm when I was touching the meteorites in the Rock Room of the Harvard Museum of Natural History. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“On Saturday, May 30, 2026, a 3-foot-wide meteor entered the atmosphere north of Boston<\/u>, creating a massive daytime fireball and a powerful double sonic boom<\/mark><\/mark>. Traveling at roughly 75,000 miles per hour, the natural space rock fragmented about 40 miles above the northeastern Massachusetts and southeastern New Hampshire border at 2:06 p.m. EDT. The resulting atmospheric explosion released an energy equivalent to 300 tons of TNT, which rattled windows, shook homes, and startled residents from Connecticut all the way north to Montreal, Canada. While the flash was too brief for most people to photograph in the bright afternoon sky, NOAA captured the intense infrared heat signature and burst of light over Cape Cod Bay and the South Shore. No ground impacts, property damage, or injuries were reported, as the meteor completely disintegrated in the air or dropped minor fragments safely into the Atlantic Ocean.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A.R.T. Musical<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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After dinner I went to the American Rep to see “Black Swan”, a musical based on the movie by Darrin Aronofsky<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I had a seat front row and center and the dancing was amazing. Mashing up a ballet with a musical really worked and the first act was stunning but the production lost its focus in the second act and descended into a hard to follow descent into madness and when the curtain fell i had no idea whether our heroine was stark raving mad or had overcome her demons. This wan’t helped by the lead not being a very good actress or singer even though her dancing was awesome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Vermont Update Ambiana has been home all week and on Sunday Night I beat her and Colleen at Scrabble. Jakobi meanwhile qualified for the New England track Meet next Saturday by placing 6th in pole vault! She is so happy! … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2603"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2606,"href":"https:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2603\/revisions\/2606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mochiandcolleen.com\/eagleledge\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}