Flop Season at the Fogg at Harvard

It’s been about a year since my last visit to Boston, so I ventured east last week, when I had a free day, to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Fogg at Harvard, and the Museum of Fine Arts over two days. Three great museums, and there are so many others. I knew the Gardner would do a top-notch exhibition based on the Old Testament’s book of Esther, and it did, with three scintillating Rembrandts. I’ll save the MFA visit for another story. I haven’t heard from all of my spies about the new director’s first year.

My favorite discovery was, at the Fogg, John Singer Sargent’s kidney-shaped palette found in his London studio in 1925, after his death. I’m not too drawn to an artist’s relics, but this one is different. Sargent was a saftig painter, meaning his surfaces are tactile and as dense and juicy as a filet mignon. He was a slasher in applying paint, piling his brush with oil paint in natural and synthetic pigments and going to town. Evidence-wise, his palette, with long-dried, cake-frosting-layers of paint, looks not only like sculpture. It’s a smoking gun.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

It’s been about a year since my last visit to Boston, so I ventured east last week, when I had a free day, to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Fogg at Harvard, and the Museum of Fine Arts over two days. Three great museums, and there are so many others. I knew the Gardner would do a top-notch exhibition based on the Old Testament’s book of Esther, and it did, with three scintillating Rembrandts. I’ll save the MFA visit for another story. I haven’t heard from all of my spies about the new director’s first year.

My favorite discovery was, at the Fogg, John Singer Sargent’s kidney-shaped palette found in his London studio in 1925, after his death. I’m not too drawn to an artist’s relics, but this one is different. Sargent was a saftig painter, meaning his surfaces are tactile and as dense and juicy as a filet mignon. He was a slasher in applying paint, piling his brush with oil paint in natural and synthetic pigments and going to town. Evidence-wise, his palette, with long-dried, cake-frosting-layers of paint, looks not only like sculpture. It’s a smoking gun.