A Walk through the World of Jane Austen at the Legion of Honor
This presentation explores the world of beloved English author, Jane Austen, through the artwork in the British gallery at the Legion of Honor. We’ll see paintings that Austen herself would have seen; portraits of ladies, gentlemen, and handsome military officers painted by famous artists such as Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds. We’ll also look at fashion, hairstyles, and the beautiful English porcelain of the time. A perspective of Jane Austen’s world will emerge, which will illuminate her life, her novels, and the fascinating time and place in which she lived.
Docent Speaker: Kathryn Zupsic
Sir Thomas Lawrence, Mary, Countess of Plymouth, ca 1817. Oil on canvas. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
When Art Went Pop!
How Andy Warhol and Friends Changed Art—Forever
The cultural world exploded in many ways in the early sixties, with visual arts in the vanguard. Learn how art moved from the serious, emotional, and virtuoso style of the Abstract Expressionists to the flash, dash, and irreverence of Andy Warhol’s soup cans and movie stars, Roy Lichtenstein’s comics, and Claus Oldenburg’s soft hamburgers. It’s a change that has endured, affecting what we see in art museums and galleries today. The Pop explosion made art fun again!
Independent Docent/Speaker: Avril Angevine
Although this talk coincides with the upcoming exhibit at SFMOMA: Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again (May 18-Sept 2, 2019) the speaker does not represent the museum.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) was both a prodigious artist and one of the most extraordinary figures of the seventeenth century. Renowned for his virtuosic handling of oil paint, his depictions of taut dramatic action, and his sensuous coloring, Rubens was also an international diplomat, a shrewd businessman, a well-read intellectual, a friend to scholars and monarchs, and the master of a prolific workshop. His early biographers regularly present Rubens as an aristocrat-artist, the favorite of Europe’s noble class, but this was far from an assured outcome. Early Rubens will focus on what is arguably the artist’s most innovative period of production, from 1608 until about 1620. It was during these years that Rubens rose to the first rank of Flemish painting through a series of social and artistic choices that laid the groundwork for his international fame and established a visual style that would guide ambitious painters for generations to come.
FAMSF Docent Speaker: Rita Dunlay
The exhibition is at the Legion of Honor, April 6 – September 8, 2019.
Peter Paul Rubens, “Daniel in the Lions’ Den”. Oil on canvas, 88 1/4 x 130 1/8 in. (224.2 x 330.5 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The exhibition features fifty paintings by Claude Monet dating mainly from 1913 to 1926, the final phase of his long career, including twenty works from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. During his late years, the well-traveled Monet stayed close to home, inspired by the variety of elements making up his own garden at Giverny, a village located some 45 miles northwest of Paris. With its evolving scenery of flower beds, footpaths, willows, wisteria, and nymphaea, the garden became a personal laboratory for the artist’s sustained study of natural phenomena. The exhibition focuses on the series that Monet invented, and just as important, reinvented, in this setting. It reconsiders the conventional notion that many of the late works painted on a large scale were preparatory for the Grand Decorations, rather than finished paintings in their own right. Boldly balancing representation and abstraction, Monet’s radical late works redefined the master of Impressionism as a forebear of modernism.
FAMSF Docent Speaker: Julia Geist
At the De Young February 16 – May 27, 2019
Image: Claude Monet, “Water Lilies” 1914–1917. Oil on canvas, 71 x 57 1/2 in. (180 x 146 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Mildred Anna Williams Collection, 1973.3
Travel the ancient routes that provided good, technologies, and ideas to countries and cultures from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Discover the transformations that resulted from the complex exchanges between East and West.
Before jet planes and smartphones, militia, merchants, monks and pilgrims spent months even years traveling over perilous land routes to carry luxury goods and new ideas thousands of miles across lost civilizations. Luxury commodities such as silk, porcelain, paper, tea, jade, amber, spices, ivory, gunpowder, gold and silver were carried across the overland trade routes known as the Silk Road. Religions and ideas, technologies and innovations spread along the trade routes in all directions.
History greats such as Alexander the Great , Marco Polo, Zhang Qian, and Genghis Khan, all left their traces on the greatest roads mankind ever known.
Come discover the complexity of the exchanges and variety of cultures transformed as a result of goods, knowledge and techniques transmitted between East and West.
Three California Colorists: Selden Connor Gile, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud
Speaker: Avril Angevine
Though styles and approaches have changed, California’s landscape has inspired artists since the state’s early days. See how the works of three great California master painters—Selden Connor Gile, Richard Diebenkorn, and Wayne Thiebaud—respond to the stunning land around us.
First Wednesday Art Talks are sponsored by the Friends of the San Rafael Public Library. The lectures are held in the Council Chambers at San Rafael City Hall,1400 Fifth Avenue, beginning promptly at 1:00 p.m. Doors open at 12:30 p.m. Seating is limited. Admission is free.
Thanksgiving Specials! It’s a perfect time to do holiday shopping as many of our books are in brand new condition which makes them ideal for gift giving. We’ll be serving hot cider and cookies in the afternoons, so everyone is invited for some good cheer and a treat!
All San Rafael Public Library programs are canceled through the end of March. Library patrons are advised to follow the recommendations issued by the Department of Public Health regarding social gatherings.
Holiday Book Sale at Friends Books all week long!
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