March 7: This day in history

From Eine Kleine Blog

The wonderful wife and I spent a lovely day at the National Gallery: Gaugin, Canaletto, a surprisingly good buffet lunch, and then the Chester Dale Collection:

• Gaugin. I don't get it. I don't find the pictures -- most of them, anyway -- at all interesting, and the colors seem washed out. A few of the early pieces are nice, but the Tahiti pictures? Please!
• Canaletto. Technically well done, but interesting? Not so much. If I understand correctly, his goal was to provide wealthy tourists with mementos of their visit to Venice -- big, high-priced, one-of-a-kind . . . um . . . er . . . postcards. If we hadn't been to Venice, the exhibit wouldn't have meant anything to us; as it was, it was pretty cool. The coolest item was a map drawn almost 300 years ago; we came within a couple blocks of finding the hotel we stayed at a two years ago.
  
• Lunch. Italian themed to tie in to the Canaletto exhibit: pasta, carpaccio of beef, parmesan, salad, seafood soup, eggplant something or other. I passed on the eggplant; the rest was really quite good -- including the $9 glass of wine.
• Chester Dale. A fabulous collection -- Picasso, Monet, Cassat, Renoir, Matisse, etc. Too bad you missed it.