Pierre-Joseph Redoute, Plum Branches Intertwined, 1802-04, watercolor on vellum. (Images Courtesy Of Yale Center For British Arts.)When Charles Ryskamp was interviewed in 2004, he found the reporter's questions about his background so tedious he snapped: "I don't want this to be an obituary." Ryskamp needn't have worried. The one-time director of both the Morgan Library and Museum and the Frick Collection died on March 26, 2010, with the best possible remembrance of his life and career on display at the Yale Center For British Art. Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp, an exhibit of 200...
Angels And Demons Reunited At Morgan Library
Hours of Catherine of Cleves, in LatinIlluminated by the Master of Catherine of ClevesThe Netherlands, Utrecht, ca. 1440(Images courtesy of Faksimile Verlag Luzern.) The first page of Catherine's prayer book foreshadows her troubled marriage. Her coat of arms as the Duchess of Guelder is centered beneath the Virgin Mary. Traditionally, her husband's crest would be illustrated atop her coat of arms. But Catherine defiantly places an Ox-- the symbol of The House of Cleves--above the emblem. Catherine is pictured praying from her Book of Hours at lower left. Her ancestors' coats of arms decorate the corners of the pages.It's every...
Morgan Library’s Christmas Gift: Display of Dickens’ Decisive Deletions
Charles Dickens' Manuscript On Display At The Morgan Library. (Photo By Angel Franco for The New York Times.)The Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan is offering modern readers a chance to see the creative process behind Victorian literature's most enduring holiday tale, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The library, housed in an Italian renaissance style palazzo in Murray Hill, holds the original manuscript of the story, written and rewritten in Dickens' own hand. According to Alison Leigh Cowan of The New York Times, the manuscript goes on display each year at the Morgan, but under glass, with only a single...