Oh the weather outside is frightful, but the Frick is so delightful!

I have a bit of backlog when it comes to "things I want to babble about" but we'll start with this and I'll see about filling in blanks.

So.  To start, an observation about weather and city humans behaviour in it.

I'm from Vancouver Canada, and this Winter has dumped far more snow on the city than Winter usually does.  This, of course, has lead to a whole bunch of memes along the lines of "welcome to the rest of the country" which is fine and dandy (except for the fact that weather is one reason in particular that I don't live elsewhere in Canada, thank you very much).  The other thing that it lead to was a series of short articles about how silly Vancouverites were for using umbrellas in the snow.

That I had issues with.  As far as I'm concerned, if it's water falling out of clouds then umbrellas are perfectly fine.  I like having something to keep snow or rain from scouring my eyeballs out of their sockets and keep my glasses from getting too hard to see through (yes, that happens), so as long as it's not too windy to do so I shall keep using umbrellas in snow and rain thanks all the same.

This is quite a long way around to come to this particular observation, but I've arrived.  The other day in New York it decided to have a good dump of snow, complete with strong wind and all the other things that go with weather.  

And I noticed something.  There were a couple of different types of clothing I saw.  There were a lot who were simply bundled up in cold weather appropriate coats with gloves and hoods (myself included.  I was more than half blind with all the water on my glasses by the time I got where I was going), and the other?  

People bundled up, but also carrying an umbrella.

My first thought was "HA!  Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, umbrella haters!"  Followed by, "well, they might not be local, I suppose."  But I saw a few too many for them all to have been out of towners.  So I have decided that the only people who are allowed to make cracks about umbrellas and snow are people who don't use them when it's raining, either.  Those who go through life in (hopefully) weather appropriate coats and shoes over their clothes (like my brother) and regularly look down on the rest of us mere mortals, and that's it.  The rest of you can stuff it.

So that's the weather.  On to the second half.

My destination on this particular snow skip was the Frick collection.  And hooooly Mary was it worth it!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Frick collection, (I was until about two months ago) it was the private art, furniture, and curio collection of Henry Clay Frick, an American industrialist and avid art collector who died in 1919.  The house the collection is housed in is the Frick house that he had built when the family moved to New York from Pittsburgh, and it's quite interesting all on it's own.  When his wife, Adelaide, died in 1931 the house was turned into a museum in order to showcase the extensive, and beautiful, collection he'd acquired over his life (one thing I find particularly cool about that is I'm pretty sure he planned it that way).

The collection, oh, the collection!  

To start off, I'm a history nut.  I love finding out what happened centuries ago and trying to piece out why.  I like going to ruins, or preserved buildings and poking about imagining what it would have looked like when it was still in use.  I like living history museums, where they've either restored or rebuilt and people dress up.  And god, do I love old art and artifacts!

I've also found, through trips to several different museums and galleries, that I'm particularly enamoured of oil paintings.  The Frick has them in abundance.  There were medieval icons, (tempera on wood panels) portraits, (most all oil on canvas or wood) Chinese porcelain, (always impressive) old clocks, (gilt, metal, gorgeous things) and quite a lot more.  

There were several pieces that particularly caught my eye.  
One was by Thomas Gainsbrough of Grace Dalrymple Elliott, a well known courtesan, and I loved it.  It caught and encapsulated one face of the courtesan and displayed it beautifully, and I'm not actually explaining this as well as I'd like.  It's a gorgeous piece and it shows a side of the society at the time that we don't get to see in beautifully done portraits very often.
Two other incredible portraits of truly remarkable women that the Frick has are the portrait of Mary Edwards by Hogarth and the portrait of the Comtesse d'Haussonville by Ingres.  If you don't know who these ladies are go look them up.

Then there were the portraits of Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell by Holbein set on either side of a fireplace, facing each other, a large portrait of the seventh Earl of Derby and his wife and daughter by Van Dyck where the impish mischief that the little girl seem to radiate captures your attention, Arrangement in Black and Gold by Whistler which is such a study in dark and light it was hard to look away, and so much more.

And the special exhibit?  Turner's ports.  With some pieces on loan from the Tate.

It was such an awesome day