A Long Look Podcast

Well, here we are my friends, the 100th and final episode! 

We go back to where it all started, the National Gallery of Art, for a look at one of Pieter de Hooch’s idealized depictions of what a D…

When critics hinted Maurice Prendergast was getting a little repetitive as he approached 50, he could’ve hung up his brushes. After all, he’d been pretty successful. Instead, he headed back to wher…

So much better than Instagram! Pierre-Auguste Renoir invited 14 friends to lunch one summer--several lunches actually--and ended up creating this spectacular work of art. 

In today’s episode we fi…

No bows and arrows, no hunting buffalo on horseback. Walter Ufer saw first-hand that Native Americans in the 1920s weren't the romanticized caricatures from the old Wild West shows.

In today's epi…

While I’m taking a break, I thought you might enjoy this encore presentation of a popular episode from 2019—the gorgeous Woman Holding a Balance at the National Gallery of Art. If you want to follow…

And you thought YOU were gonna have a lot of holiday company! Poor Mary, who’s only given birth a week or so ago, now faces this onslaught of unexpected visitors in today’s episode. 

We’ll find ou…

Today’s episode is all about relaxing, taking a little break after a long year and before the holidays hit. So I offer you a quiet beach at the Jersey Shore in this serene painting by William Trost …

Welcome back! I hope you all had a great summer. We’ll be spending the rest of 2024 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, starting off with a stunning portrait of a red-headed Irish beauty…

“A Long Look” returns with new episodes soon! Meanwhile, I've been looking down the road trying to figure out the future of the show and realized I've been doing all the talking for the past 7 year…

Well, we’ve reached the end of our brief tour of the Smithsonian American Art Museum! I hope you’ve enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun getting to share this unique place with you and introduce you to s…

In today’s episode we look at “Floating Clouds” by Hisako Hibi, one of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in prison camps on the West Coast during WWII. Paintings like this served as …

Just in time for your Memorial Day travels, here’s an extended episode celebrating the anniversary of Impressionism! We take another look at three of the originals: Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, an…

It’s starting to get warm out so the seaside’s on my mind! In the latest episode we visit Appledore on the Isles of Shoals with American painter Childe Hassam. This group of islands off the coast of…

Henry Sturgis Drinker and Cecilia Beaux had a complicated history but that didn’t get in the way of Cecilia making him the subject of one of her best portraits.

In today’s episode, we’ll find out…

Putting ordinary people in odd, unsettling surroundings was the specialty of Hughie Lee-Smith. In today’s episode we look at his “Confrontation” from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

We’’ll f…

Merry Christmas! For this year’s holiday episode we're looking at this kind of unusual Nativity scene jammed packed with the detail those Northern European Renaissance artists just loved!

We’ll fi…

Just in time for Thanksgiving, we take a look at this sumptuous feast by one of the stars of still-life painting, Pieter Claesz. We'll find out three hints that tell us who might have owned this fabu…

In today’s episode we’re looking at “Childhood” by Thomas Cole. It’s the first of a series of enormous paintings he did called “The Voyage of Life.” 

We’ll find out how Cole used this series to pu…

Autumn is a season of change, so it seemed like the perfect time to announce a few changes happening with the show! 

First, I've got new music! The current theme did the job when I started way back i…

This work by Edouard Vuillard reminds me of the old Magic Eye images that ran in the Sunday comics back in the ’90s. You’d be presented with a dense, colorful pattern and have to figure out what the…