We went to the National Gallery of Art yesterday to see the three room Mary Cassatt exhibit. Cassatt was an American, born into a  wealthy family, who decided she wanted to be an artist. She went to Paris to study for a while, and a while turned out to be more than 50 years. She hobnobbed with the Impressionists and gained more than a modicum of fame.

There are about 40 pieces in the show. Most of them belong to the National Gallery which has more Cassatts than any other museum. I did not know that.

I was not overwhelmed by the paintings. That does not mean I did not like them, but somehow I felt they looked  worse in real life than in reproductions. Here are three I liked the best. You will of course be seeing them in reproduction.

First, her mother.

Next, a young girl.

Then, a young woman

The exhibit also included many prints, a discipline in which Cassatt did much work (but nobody ever told me). She was often influenced, apparently, by Japanese print making. That serms obvious.

But not always.

Did she ever paint a man? I am not sure.

We saw two other special exhibits. One was perhaps the most unusual exhibit I have ever seen at the museum. 140 photographs, taken as early as the 1850s, to demonstrate mining and minors mainly .. but not exclusively in the United States. If you want to see it, you only have a few months before it moves to Milwaukee. Here is one example.

Here is another.

There are 138 more.

The one just above was take at Granite Silver Mine in Montana. Now a ghost town, then it had a population of 3000. Granite is about 100 miles south of Garnet, the gold mining ghost town we visited last month, which once had 1000 residents. This is a photo I took of Garnet.

Next to this exhibit, there is a smaller exhibit on art devoted to Niagara Falls. It is centered around Frederic Church’s well known painting.

Washington artist Sam Gilliam painted a tribute to this painting, which he called “Niagara on the Potomac”.

Go figure.