Word: genteel
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Most of the actors do a good job of playing stuffy, pathetic snobs. Barton is the best of these, and has the most consistent accent. Salloway is good as a faded remnant of British Raj, but the performance I saw, he destroyed the genteel atmosphere with an ad-libbed "Oh shit!" Alexander and Shapiro are a bit bland, though they are probably supposed to be. Constantine Contes, as Jack's manservant, bears the indignities and follies of his employer with wonderful heavenward eye-rolls...
...Mary Cassatt of boaters feeding ducks, and a set of admirable monotypes by Maurice Prendergast. There is also some very minor work by famous names (Homer, Martin Johnson Heade, John Frederick Kensett) and a plethora of those 1890s contre-jour pictures of nice Boston girls in flowing chiffon scarves -- genteel provincial salon painting that has been revived as a market craze for investors now that the supply of Childe Hassams and the like is running...
...need only compare his painting of the nude Helga with a black ribbon round her neck, face averted, floating in a soup of dark shadow, with the work on which it is based: Manet's Olympia. There, one has all the contrast between what is deep and what is genteel, between brazen, ironic intelligence and mere sensibility, between the harsh confrontational skills of a great talent and the tepid virtuosity of a popular one. This show is too much of a medium-good thing, and its ever docile public has been led to it by the nose...
...Once the genteel pursuit of an esoteric minority, birding is evolving into a mass sport. A 1980 study for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that some 2 million Americans were highly committed birders, meaning that they watch regularly, use a field guide, keep a life list and are able to identify a hundred or more species of birds. About 7 million Americans are fairly interested birders (able to identify at least 40 species), and 60 million, or one American in four, are at least casual watchers. Veteran birders, such as L. Hartsell Cash, a retiree in Winston-Salem...
...Yorkers, not restricted to the fabled 400 of old Manhattan society but not much exceeding a few thousand either. There are those who think this subject was pretty well exhausted by the time Henry James and Edith Wharton got through with it. Others argue that portraits of the genteel rich are beside the point in this century of the common man. Yet Auchincloss, 69, periodically turns out a book so sparkling and assured as to render such complaints irrelevant...