Art Objects from the Metropolitan Museum Of art in New York

Introduction

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, known colloquially as The Met, is an art museum located on the eastern edge of Central Park, along what is known as Museum Mile in New York City, USA. There are many painting and art work preserved there. Few of them, which will be discussed in this paper would be Hiram Power's California (1870), van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1887) and Georges de La Tour's The Fortune Teller (1960).

Hiram Powers, California (1870)

In early 1850, Powers began work on a full-size figure inspired by the widely publicized California Gold Rush of 1849. He first called the subject Incognita, then La Dorada, before finally settling on California. Initially Powers envisioned his figure as a young Indian woman dressed in a simple costume, but in the final model he instead depicted a nude with a Native American countenance (hard for modern viewers to discern). According to Powers, "… an Indian woman … stands in a reserved and guarded posture and with a watchful expression, holding the divining rod in her left hand, and pointing with it down to the earth, under a large quartz crystal, which supports the figure on the right. Quartz is the matrix of gold and the divining rod is the miner's wand, or the scepter of 'California' … (Lynne, p.20)

In the right hand, which is held behind, there is a branch of thorns, to finish the allegory for she is the miner's goddess, or 'Fortune,' and as it is usual to represent the Goddess 'Fortune' with good in one hand and evil in the other, by suitable emblems I have done so with 'California,' and the moral is that all is not gold that glitters …" Powers hoped the newly admitted State of California would request a colossal version of his California, but in the end nothing came of this dream. In 1855, a purchaser for California came forward in the person of wealthy New Yorker William Backhouse Astor.

California was translated into marble in Italy and finally received by Astor in New York in December 1858. The sculpture was installed in the Astor residence in a room designed to showcase it and on a pedestal that turned on iron rollers so it could be easily viewed from all sides. California was the first American sculpture—indeed the first work by an American artist—to be acquired by the Museum. (Lynne, p.10)

van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1887)

Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1887), a van Gogh self-portrait done in Paris, is one of his most intriguing yet most neglected works. The artist's morose eyes stare out from his face in half-profile, facing to the left, and the world-weary expression initially appears to support the view of critics such as James Risser, who explains van Gogh's self-portraits as a sustained search for identity. (Dieter, pp.1-2)

“The unfolding image portrayed in [the self-portraits] seemingly parallels the life of the artist…We see in [them] what we know all too well ...