-By Howard Lyon

I recently made a trip to the National Gallery of Art and National Portrait Gallery/American Art Museum and I managed to get some good closeups! Incidentally, I did a post with tips for photographing paintings in museums if you are interested.

The images are really large, but Blogger scales them down, so here is a zip file you can download from Google Drive

Frederic Edwin Church – Niagara – 1857

Such an incredible painting. It is breathtaking in person as you can stand and have it fill your peripheral because of the scale. Something that stood out to me, and you can see it in the details, is how little blending there is on much of the painting. The effects are created with many opaque strokes.

Thomas Wilmer Dewing – Lady with a Lute – 1886

This first image is downloaded from the National Gallery of Art site. I didn’t end up with a good set of images to make a full composite. The lighting on this painting is really dim, but it still glows in person.


 Thomas Moran – Green River Cliffs, Wyoming – 1881

I love the strong dramatic light and stylized colors in this one. Looking at the closeups, the paint surface is rich and juicy!

Thanks, I’ll have more from this trip in a future post!