Word: vanderlyn
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...history is heading for a comeback. A 165-ft. panorama of the palace and gardens at Versailles, painted in two CinemaScope-like sections, it is being installed this week in a specially built circular room in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. Versailles is a masterwork of sobersided, redheaded John Vanderlyn (1775-1852), a painter deeply admired in his youth, deeply pitied in old age, and deeply buried in the textbooks after his death. The picture's new home at the Met should do much to rescue Painter Vanderlyn from his long oblivion...
Among his early distinctions, Vanderlyn was the first American painter to conquer naked flesh. Actually, he had small choice in the matter; his patron, Aaron Burr, decided it by sending him to Paris instead of London for training. The earnest student from Kingston, N.Y. struck the French capital in 1796, when Jacques-Louis David and his neoclassic followers were preparing the stage for Napoleon's posturings. Trapped in the doctrinaire icebox of neoclassicism, Vanderlyn conscientiously set about acquiring its basic asset: figure drawing. He also acquired its defects: stale colors and chill poses...