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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

OGIC: Old Masters on parade

May 8, 2005 by Terry Teachout

An alert reader tipped me off that I should include links to the paintings Randall Jarrell writes about in the poem below, and he’s absolutely right. I’m about to add them to the original post, and I list them here, too:


– Georges La Tour’s St. Sebastian Mourned by St. Irene.

– Hugo van der Goes’s Nativity, which serves as the central panel of the Portinari Alterpiece, whose wings are also described in the poem and may be viewed here and here.

– And, of course, the justly famous Bruegel painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.


I’ll have to get back to you on the Veronese.


I’ve been thinking of doing some serious winnowing of my book collection, which is slowly but surely taking over the space in which I live. Today, however, was one of those days when I’m reminded of why I hesitate. Unsatisfied with what images I could find online of the van der Goes painting (the Web Museum image linked above is quite good, but I missed it in my earlier Google Image search), I scanned my art books shelf and came up with the big, beautiful Art Treasures of the Uffizi & Pitti, which contains a crisp, gorgeous color plate of the central panel. It was definitely a moment when the hulking mass of bound paper in here looked, for a blessed second, like a library of my own, a collection containing wonders I didn’t know I had. What else is in here? When will I stumble on it, and on what unforeseen quest? It’s the upside of owning almost twice as many books as you’ve read. So maybe, I’m now thinking, the object isn’t so much to get rid of books as to get to know them a little better.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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