Mattatuck Museum 1

Mattatuck Museum

  My first museum experience for this class brought me to the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut. I came to this museum with both my parents, which allowed me to have a fun family experience while enjoying the art. While looking around at the art, three painting caught my attention while venturing around the art gallery.

            The first painting that I was pulled to was by the artist Kay Sage, her art work was surrealism, and this style of art always fascinates me. Her painting is called My Room has Two Doors, made in 1939. In the painting there is a giant egg that is in the center, which Sage said symbolizes the fragility of life. The surrealist symbolism is the reason why I am pulled to her paintings, and as I was standing in front of her painting, staring at the giant egg, I was seeing the deep meaning behind the name of the painting. It was like she was trying to say that the “two doors” are the choices we make in life and the egg is symbolizing the drastic change that can happen by making hard choices that can be very fragile to our well-being. Surrealist drawings seem to fall in the category of expression like many other different styles of art, and that is why I liked Kay Sage’s painting.

Surrealist style paintings were not the only ones to grasp my attention; there was also a still life painting by the artist Soren Emil Carlsen. Carlsen enjoyed the style of art, which he was said to be “greatly influenced by the still life paintings of the 18^th century French artist, Jean Chardin.” Carlsen did not give a name to his art work, but referring to it as Fish and Kettle as a title would be a great way to describe the painting. The fish and the tea kettle in a low key setting brings out that feeling in history when there was no electricity, because of the dark features that seem as if the light hitting off the luster of the kettle and the scales of the fish are from a candle flame.

            The third painting out of all the art at this museum was the beautiful. The painting called icebergs; the reason why I liked its beauty was because of the light of the sun hitting off the ice was well painted by Fredric Edwin Church. He was quoted as describing the icebergs as, “a vast metropolis in ice pearly white and red as roses, glittering in the sunset.” He was in my opinion very skilled at being able to get the look of the sunset hitting the ice incredibly perfect.

            The museum was very small and only had two floors available to look at paintings. Though they had quit a few good pieces of art, it still seemed not as thrilling as I hoped. Also, there was a wedding going on the third floor so there wasn’t much else we were able to see and ended up only able to spend an hour and a half there.  

            My mother thought that some of the paintings were good but she had the same opinion as me when it came to the size of the place and the amount of art they had. My dad had no real comment for the place except when the guy at the front desk asked him about the visit, which he said, “It was good,” but that doesn’t mean much when it is coming from my dad.  

I felt that this being the first museum that I experienced for this class, it wasn’t that great, but there are still others that I am willing to see and have an opinion about. Besides the paintings that I enjoyed, as I said there not being much else, the rest wasn’t of interest and to rate from 1 being bad to 10 being the best… I give it a 6. The art was good, but the place didn’t spark much interest all together.

"Summer Landscape" by Charles Seely Gaylord

Another Picture by Kay Sage