It's a perspective that helps the viewer understand the tender, poetic landscapes of James A. Suydam (1819-1865), a thoughtful amateur painter, well-to-do merchant and charitable art collector who is the nominal subject of a sweetly pleasurable touring exhibition at the National Academy Museum.
One of the exhibition's most pleasurable moments comes in the second room, where the curators have assembled "Pursuit" (1941-42), an image of a girl on a carousel, surrounded by several preparatory or related sketches and drawings.
It is both intensely pleasurable and highly addictive," says Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy, the London gallery that this month plays host to the paintings, drawings and works of art purchased over the last 40 years by Andrew Lloyd Webber Andrew Lloyd Webber, Britain's most successful contemporary composer.
"Collecting is in a way like hunting, in that not only does one derive aesthetic pleasure from the objects collected, but the actual pursuit of them is also pleasurable," Mr. de Unger wrote in the catalog for an exhibition of works from his collection at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin in 2007.
The show was conceived by Johanna Burton, one of the brightest curatorial minds at work today; expect an exhibition in which the political and the pleasurable are intertwined.
Anne Swartz, the show's curator, takes this approach in her essay in the exhibition catalog, arguing that Pattern and Decoration artists "embraced the joyful, pleasurable, optimistic, and inclusive aspects of feminism".
A longer, and far more pleasurable, elaboration can be found in text, pictures and objects at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, where an exhibition devoted to "Money and Beauty" continues into 2012.
Pleasurable physical intimacies followed.
