Cara Healey is finishing up her freshman year at Princeton University. She really has no idea what she wants to do with her life, beyond learning Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, which could lead to a Comparative Literature major, or maybe some cool job that involves lots of traveling, but maybe not. She also enjoys referring to herself in the third person.
She had never taken an art history class before this one. She cannot draw anything more elegant than stick figures, let alone paint tables, cover screens, or net purses. Miss Bingley would find her a very ill accomplished young lady indeed (and before you ask, Cara is in love with Pride and Prejudice, most especially Mr. Darcy). Suffice to say, Cara had no formal training in art or its history. In fact, all of her knowledge in this subject until recently came from being a quiz bowl player (think Jeopardy) for 9 years (shudders at the admission of something so dorky). Yes, she was one of those awful, despicable posers, who sat around and memorized lists of paintings by title, artist, and description, and could rattle off this information with an obnoxious, self satisfied grin, but never really studied the works, or in some cases, never even knew what they looked like (and right now she is blushing in shame).
Last summer she went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, something she had wanted to do ever since she saw the Sesame Street movie Don’t Eat the Pictures when she was three. In addition to deciding the Temple of Dendur is way cooler when Big Bird and Snuffleupagus are locked in over night and have experiences with an Egyptian prince, a demon, and Osirus, than on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, she also had some time to appreciate some of the art. She absolutely fell in love with a painting by Renoir called In the Meadow, probably because the girls reminded her of time spent with her best friend. She promptly bought a print, which now hangs on the wall of her dorm room. Ever since then, she decided she ought to take some kind of art class, and a class involving Impressionism seemed like it would give her a chance to learn more about In the Meadow. Little did she know she would not end up researching Renoir’s paintings of pretty girls in dresses, but instead his paintings of pretty boys in dresses.
Above: Renoir, Pierre Auguste. In the Meadow. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.