Sovereign Bank in Springfield, Mass.

On first stepping in to the lobby of the Sovereign Bank building in downtown Springfield, Mass., you see what appear to be reproductions of some very well-known paintings.

Among those represented are: Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," Magritte's "Son of Man," Vermeer's "The Milkmaid," and so forth.

You'll see a photographic representation of the Magritte with this post. You can see photos of the Botticelli and Vermeer works by following those links.

But the paintings in the lobby of Sovereign Bank, it turns out, aren't reproductions, as you'll see if you look more closely. These are 1:1 scale copies, made by college students (non-art majors).

The result is fascinating -- I wish I had had photo reproductions of the originals with me while I was looking them over last weekend. As it was, I could sense but not really study the differences.

Each of the examples involves one or more human figures -- I suspect anything abstract could be construed as 'cheating.' And in these human figures (with the notable exception of the Magritte, which famously involves a green apple where the face should be) require the portrayal of a human face. And there's the rub, for the copyists.

As Cicily observed to me, none of the faces looked quite right. It is as if this is the crucial distinction between a master and even a good copyist.

We weren't there to see this, but to watch Josh Oliveira paint live. For a photo of the result go here.

With all due respect to Oliveira, I think the lobby copies could be transformed with some proper curatorial attention into a wonderful exhibit. As it is, too much is left unexplained by the scarce explanatory material about. Did the students chose which painting they were going to copy, for example, or did they pull the assignment of a hat?

If the latter, I hope the hat involved was a bowler!

Last weekend

I don' usually add to this blog on a Tuesday, but this week I'll give you an expanded schedule, in order to celebrate the fulfillment of one of my New Years' resolutions for 2008 -- I had said that I would watch an opera at the Met while wearing a tuxedo. Check.

There was much else to my weekend in Manhattan too. There was the Frick collection, for example. Let me start with that.

Who was Henry Clay Frick? He was the enterprising fellow who in 1871 created the Frick Coke Company. It consisted of a beehive oven that turned coal into the coke used in turn to produce steel. Years later Frick entered into a partnership with Andrew Carnegie, because Carnegie needed a secure supply of coke for his expanding steel manufacturing empire.

The business history of that time is fascinating, but let us return to his eye for art, which would seem to have been superb.

The Frick Collection, somewhat (though it appears only sporadically) updated by his heirs remains HQ-ed where he wanted it to be, and is filled with a variety of works in many media from many countries and periods, including great works from the Italian renaissance up to those of the impressionists and post-impressionists of his own era.

One of the first paintings we saw when we walked into the place was, as it happens, a Dutch baroque work, a Vermeer that I have described on this blog before.

The painting I have in mind is "Officer and Laughing Girl" and I first encountered a reproduction thereof as the cover art for a book, Vermeer's Hat, which I read earlier this year.

I found the painting quite compelling, even as cover art, chiefly because of the map. Behind the man and woman seated at a table, and just above their heads from our perspective, there is a large wall map. I stared at that for an hour the first time I saw the book, trying to figure out what part of the world the map depicts.

Eventually, I got it. Part of the problem is that the orientation of the map treats WEST as "up." We are so accustomed in the early 21st century to seeing the north edge of a map as up that this is literally disorientating. Dis-occidentalating too.

The other problem is that Vermeer has painted the land as blue and the water as brown, rather than the reverse.

Once a viewer has made both of these adjustments, he can see that this is a map of Holland.

So I knew of this painting, and had even discussed it recently with the friend who was my companion as we walked into the Frick building. (She had used it to tweak me about my literalness, "are painters allowed to do that???") But I had no idea of its provenance, and was delighted to see it.

Indeed, nearly too delighted. I was excitedly pointing out the features of the painting that fascinate me and, in my absorption in the moment, my pointing finger must have gotten a bit too close to the painting. Some sort of alarm went off and a security guard asked me -- nicely but firmly -- to step back.

I hope the readers of this blog enjoy the painting too. And not just in the tiny pixellated form above. Get thee to Manhattan.

Still here? Okay. Anyway, I'll say something more about the Frick tomorrow and then on Thursday and Friday turn to the other elements of my trip. Including the aforementioned opera.

Vermeer's Hat: A Review

Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, by Timothy Brook, Bloomsbury Press, London UK, 2008, 272 pp., $27.95 (cloth).

As the subtitle indicates, Mr. Brook isn't writing a work of aesthetic appreciation of Vermeer's paintings. He is using them as an entry point for broad observations about the seventeenth century, global trade, and the route from there to here.

Still, Vermeer gets the starring role as does a certain beaver-pelt hat.

The hat is there (aside from the title) in the cover art, which reproduces "Officer and Laughing Girl." The officer, in full uniform and with the hat slanted a bit to the left, has his back to us, because his attention is on the young woman to the right and mid-background.

She's grinning but it's a bit of an overstatement to say that she's laughing. Still, it appears that the officer has come a-courting and is doing well.

The scene gives Mr. Brook the chance to inform us that the custom whereby a man would remove his hat indoors, especially in the presence of a lady, had not yet developed.

"When Vermeer painted a man without a hat, he was someone at work: a music teacher or a scientist. A courting man did not go hatless."

Behind the recipient of his attentions is a map, serving as a wall decoration. It would not have been cheap -- the map, along with the furnishings and the heavy elaborate window, indicates that this is a comfortable home. She's quite a catch.

That hat, though, leads Brook into a discussion of the 17th century trade in pelts, and this gets us a very different sort of map before we've turned too many pages into this discussion -- a map of the trade routes of the Great Lakes region of North America, where those fashionable beavers were to be found.

All in all, a fine book by Mr. Brooks, though structured as a bit of a stew.