PORTRAIT OF HENRY G. MARQUAND. By John S. Sargent
Mr. Marquand was the second president of the Metropolitan Museum
Entered as second-class matter March 10, 1913, at the postoffice at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1918, by The Mentor Association, Inc.
NOTE.—In choosing the illustrations for this number, we have selected, for the most part, pictures that have not been reproduced in The Mentor heretofore. The Mentor has drawn largely on the Metropolitan Museum for illustrations, many of the well-known masterpieces there having been reproduced in one number or another. A list of Metropolitan Museum pictures already published in The Mentor will be supplied on request.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, among all the art collections in our country, undoubtedly has the best claim to first importance, and is becoming more and more a place of pilgrimage for the hosts that visit New York each year.
The Metropolitan Museum has grown so that it is no longer to be compassed in a morning visit. The pictures alone require more than that, many times more, and they form but one department. Much greater benefit will come from part of a day or a whole day spent with a single school of painting. As far as possible, this is the way in which the pictures are hung, but several bequests have been conditional upon their being kept intact, and a trip from one end of the building to the other is sometimes necessary to compare pictures by the same artist. The paintings now owned number about twelve hundred. Not all of these are on exhibition, but loaned pictures bring the total to about that figure.
TITUS, SON OF REMBRANDT. By Rembrandt
New York was founded by the Dutch, and it is a singular coincidence that the Dutch School is the strongest at the Metropolitan Museum. Both Hals and Rembrandt, the leaders of this school, are well represented, and in few European museums can Rembrandt and his school be studied to better purpose. Hals was born in 1584, Rembrandt in 1606. Rembrandt worked in Amsterdam, Hals at Haarlem, only fourteen miles away. There are several pictures attributed to Hals, the elder and younger, and the number is sometimes increased by loans. “The Merry Company,” in the Altman Collection, is more pretentious than the others, but if it could be hung between the two portraits in the Marquand Room at the head of the main stairway, it would seem garish alongside the masterly treatment of the blacks in the “Portrait of a Man,” or the wonderful drawing of the hands in the “Portrait of a Woman.”