Can you pick the near Vermeer?

 

So is this the close-but-no-cigar Vermeer?

    Odd. I'm a certified art museum buff. We're members of the great Art Institute of Chicago and visit regularly, seldom missing a new exhibit. I love nudging Chicagoans toward Pilsen's National Museum of Mexican Art — few seem to go otherwise. I've even been to the quirky little Intuit Art Museum , with its tableau of the apartment of the deeply strange outsider artist Henry Darger. Though not since they expanded into Howard Tullman's old apartment. Going back to check out the new arrangement is high on my agenda.

     When visiting just about any city, hitting the local art museum is always a top priority, though after touring the museums in most smaller cities my main takeaway is near pity. The Art Institute they're not. 

     Still, most museums have at least one work worth seeing — Dallas's Amon Carter Museum of American Art, for instance, has Grant Wood's ever-more-significant "Parson Weems Fable." 

     Sometimes I fall down on the job. It hurt me to be in New York City recently and not hurry to the Met to see the John Singer Sargent show. But time was limited, and duty called.
    Generally, I collect museums the way other guys collect major league ballparks. The Prado. The Louvre. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, plus the Van Gogh Museum. The British Museum. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I'm proud to have gone to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum before its famous 1990 art heist. 
     But the National Gallery of Art in Washington just wasn't on my radar. Maybe, given a spare few hours in the nation's capital, I always rush to the National Portrait Gallery, with its hall of presidents, or the American History Museum. Even the little round Hirshhorn. 

Or maybe this one? 

     

     On the 4th of July, I was headed to the Air & Space Museum— haven't seen that for years — but it was all sold out (tickets are free, but you need one). So we wandered over to the National Gallery, which turns out to have an enormous, deep collection — the only Leonardo da Vinci in the Western hemisphere (her room packed with tourists taking selfies of themselves, in some daft after echo of the mobs around the Mona Lisa). 
     An astounding trove of French impressionists, including Monet after Monet. My wife confessed to not being a fan of his near homophone, Manet, but by the time we were done she was won over by works such as "The Dead Toreador." 
     Rare paintings and studies by Georges Seurat, who created the Art Institute's masterpiece "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (rare because he died at 31) 

Or this one?

     The museum has an excellent Dutch collection, with a number of fine Rembrandts. It also has three of the world's 34 known paintings by Johannes Vermeer. As a fan of his quiet scenes of Dutch domestic life, I headed over to see them. 

     The National Gallery used to have four Vermeers. But in 2022 the museum took advantage of being closed due to COVID to put its Vermeers under sophisticated scanners, and decided one of them wasn't done by the master himself — the brushstrokes are wrong, apparently — but by someone in his studio.
     Knowing this, it seemed clearly inferior. But that opinion might have been skewed by knowing it wasn't from the master's hand. Which inspires me to quiz EGD readers. Take a look at these four paintings. Can you tell which three are real, supposedly, and which four is not quite up to Vermeer standards? The New York Times spills the beans here.

     I'm only touching upon the glories of the National Gallery of Art. In three hours we saw maybe half of it.

    I've been to the Rodin museums in Paris and Philadelphia, but was still impressed by their collection of his busts and sculptures (this time I managed to resist pointing out. yet again, that German poet Rainer Maria Rilke was Rodin's secretary. Typically my resolve fails me — as it did when I found myself mentioning, for the umpteeth time, that Rodin's Thinker is supposed to be an incredibly buff Dante, conjuring up his Inferno). 

    If you go before Nov. 2, check out the ground floor exhibit "Little Beasts: Art, Wonder and the Natural World," a fascinating deep dive into 16th and 17th century depictions of insects and other small creatures. 

    Oh, and in addition to being a museum fan, I'm also a foodie, and lunch at the National Gallery was first rate — a chicken and orange salad for me for $18, a curry chicken salad for my wife. It's tiring work slogging through gallery after gallery, and nothing braces you for the effort than a plate of high grade chow.