Margaret and I rode the Metro into the District of Columbia today to wander around the museums.  What a surprise to run into at the National Gallery of Art one of the greatest treasures of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Johannes Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (c. 1663). We said goodbye to this wonderful painting at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego just two weeks ago.  The painting is on its way back to Amsterdam, and it is temporarily joining several works by the artist and his contemporaries in the Cabinet Galleries of the National Gallery.  

Among other works of art, we also stopped to see a Central Italian sculpture of the She-Wolf Suckling Romulus and Remus, a late 15th-16th century bronze.  We also enjoyed El Rio del Luz, The River of Light, by Frederick Edwin Church. It was a  Church oil done in 1877.  Wow!