Reproduced in the 2019 Summer issue of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Magazine is a 1930 portrait painted by Gari Melchers of John Barton Payne.  The caption with it announces a new practice being instituted by museum conservators to display on-going …

Sometimes when our guests enter the dining room and encounter the monumental painting Market Scene (above, 12′ x 7′) they profess to having seen it somewhere before. Are they imagining it? Probably not!  Many of our guests are true globetrotters who mi …

Earlier this week, Mark Mitchell, Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery, visited Gari Melchers Home and Studio in preparation for an exhibition he is organizing under the working title The Expressive …

Much to our delight, our conservators have been busily cranking out refurbished canvases this fall, thanks to generous gifts from the Margaret Walker Purinton Conservation Fund and our Giving Day contributors. Come see what your gifts have made possibl …

I am happy to report that a long-neglected portrait in the Belmont collection is about to have its day in the sun.  Thanks to conservation funding from the Margaret Walker Purinton Foundation, Portrait of a Lady and Young Boy has just returned from con …

The Little Green House A painting entirely new to me by Gari Melchers entitled The Little Green House has surfaced, and is to be sold at auction in Sotheby’s American Art sale scheduled for March 28, 2018. The signed oil on canvas measuring 18 ½ x 15 1 …

For the first time in 1000 years it looks like the famed Bayeux Tapestry will be allowed to travel for exhibition to England, the country whose early history it so evocatively recounts. “In a sensational stroke of cultural diplomacy,” writes the Washin …

Recently when my husband and I were visiting our son we spent a pleasurable afternoon in the Seattle Art Museum. They have a wonderful collection.  In anticipation of my upcoming trip to the Hudson River Valley, I paid particular attention to the pione …

An old ship model now hangs aloft in one corner of Gari Melchers’ studio at Belmont. It is the very same model the painter suspended from the ceiling of his studio in Holland years earlier, as documented by a photograph of his studio interior from arou …

Reprinted from Sketches, a Newsletter for the Friends of Belmont, Spring/Summer 2005   On December 1, 2004, some staggering news from New York may have had Gari Melchers doing flip-flops in his grave; the staff at Belmont certainly met the report with …