In this week’s episode of “Travels with a Curator,” travel with Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, to Valenciennes, the birthplace of the Rococo painter Jean-Antoine Watteau. Delve into the historical events surrounding Watteau’s “Portal at Valenciennes” (ca. 1710–11), a scene of soldiers at rest near the ramparts of the town. Known for his depictions of garden frolics, Watteau seldom portrayed military life—“The Portal” is one of only three such paintings that survive today.
Valenciennes is a commune in the Nord department in northern France. It lies on the Scheldt river. Although the city and region experienced a steady population decline between 1975 and 1990, it has since rebounded.
…what perhaps absorbed him most was a suite of 10 paintings of one of the weeping willows he had planted on the shores of his pond in 1893, when he had purchased the property to construct his aquatic paradise. The tree had grown in girth and grandeur over the intervening years, its leafy arms now extending out over the dappled waters like an impassioned conductor energizing an orchestra.
In this week’s episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Curator Aimee Ng studies Thomas Gainsborough’s scandalous portrait of Grace Dalrymple Elliott. Discover why this painting met with a negative reception when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1782. Mrs. Elliott later moved to France, where she lived through the Reign of Terror and died in 1823 in the outskirts of Paris. This week’s complementary cocktail is the Pimm’s Cup, a traditional summer drink in Britain.
A bird-monster devouring sinners, naked bodies in tantric contortions, a pair of ears brandishing a sharpened blade: with just 20 paintings and nine drawings to his name, Netherlandish visionary 
Boomers Daily 