Ye Olde Portraits at the Hammer Museum

The Hammer Museum is a small but excellent (and, bonus, always free!) museum in LA. Most of their galleries are devoted to modern and contemporary art (about which more anon) but there are two large galleries dedicated to the original art collection of industrialist Armand Hammer, who founded the joint back in the days when industrialists and robber barons did things like found art museums to show what cultured guys they really were. One room is all big lovely Impressionist nature canvases and the other is full of portraits. I really liked those portraits. They had faces and features and expressions and eyes that looked so familiarly human. I mean, there they are, blobs of paint meant to represent people who lived in different eras and who would not get us at all, nor would we get them. And yet they look so recognizably like people. That sounds obvious and inevitable, but not all portraits are like that. But many of these ones were. So, here you go.

The above is anonymous gentleman is attributed to Theodore Gericault

Sarah Bernhardt by Alfred Stevens

Rembrandt doing his divine self-portrait thing

Peter Paul Rubens doing his divine Rubenesque thing

Monsieur Jacquet by Edgar Degas

Alice Legouve by Edourad Manet

Portrait of a Man in Armour by Titian