Fwd: Francis Morrone Summer 2026
Claire C
From: Francis Morrone <fmor...@buttondown.email>
Date: Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 5:58 PM
Subject: Francis Morrone Summer 2026
To: <claire.ca...@gmail.com>
Hello,
Here’s my lineup for summer 2026.
For Scarsdale Adult School I will be leading several walking tours as well as presenting a three-part series by Zoom. And as I do every year, I am teaching a summer film course for New York University’s School of Professional Studies.
For Scarsdale Adult School:
LONDON, PARIS, AND NEW YORK IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
Link
4/29–5/13 1:00–2:00 Wednesday
Lectures on each of the three cities in the second half of the 18th century. We’ll begin with New York, by far the smallest of the three, and its role in the run-up to the American Revolution, its experience of the war itself, and its role in the formation of the new nation. Paris meanwhile hurtled toward its own revolution. London, by this time the most important city in the world, avoided revolution (it had had its own “Glorious Revolution” in 1688) but was obviously bound up with what was going on in its colonies and kept a close, jaundiced eye on what was going on in Paris. This was also the first great age of Americans in Paris: Thomas Jefferson lived there from 1784 to 1789, Benjamin Franklin from 1777 to 1785. We will focus on what the cities looked like, and at what made them cauldrons of unrest in a time of new political and economic ideas (Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776), of globalization, and of industrial revolution (the flying shuttle 1733, James Watt’s steam engine and the spinning jenny 1764, the spinning mule 1774, the power loom 1785).
Remember that these are recorded, so that you can view them at your leisure.
TURTLE BAY
Link
5/14 2:00–3:30 Thursday
We’ll walk around the neighborhood of the United Nations, and inland to Third Avenue, to understand how Turtle Bay took shape and changed over time. The walk will have a bit of a focus on the interwar years when the neighborhood (think Turtle Bay Gardens and Amster Yard) was home to many writers, actors, designers, and other creative types. The walk will include my favorite parking garage, and you won’t want to miss that.
EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK
Link
6/1 Monday 2:00–3:30
I haven’t led this tour since before the pandemic, so I figured it was time. Edith Jones was born in 1862 at 14 West 23rd Street in a house that is surprisingly still standing. Though from ages four to ten she lived abroad, she spent her formative teenage and early adult years in New York and married Teddy Wharton at Trinity Chapel on West 25th Street. Her first story (“Mrs. Manstey’s View,” still very much worth reading) appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in 1891. Scribner, located right around the corner from her birthplace, published her first book, The Decoration of Houses (co-written with Ogden Codman Jr.), in 1897, and her first novel, The Valley of Decision, in 1902. The neighborhood around Madison Square (in which she played as a child) is rich in Wharton associations. If you wish to read something by her that is particularly relevant to this tour, I recommend her beautifully written autobiography A Backward Glance (1934) and, especially, her novella “New Year’s Day,” part of the Old New York tetralogy published in 1924. (“New Year’s Day” is available for free at Project Gutenberg.)
CELEBRATING AMERICA’S 250TH IN PHILADELPHIA
Link
6/17 Wednesday 11:00–3:00
You’ll get to Philadelphia on your own. (The quickest and most expensive way is by Amtrak. The less quick and much less expensive way is by a combination of New Jersey Transit to Trenton, and SEPTA from Trenton to Philadelphia.) We will then do two walks focusing on the nation’s founding (as well as miscellaneous other stuff), separated by a brief break in which you may wish to grab something to eat, rest, or walk around on your own. If this works, I hope to do a number of other tours in places outside but near to New York. Next up: New Haven.
NEW YORK CITY AND THE NATION’S FOUNDING
Link
7/15 Wednesday 2:00–3:30
This is a variation on an old tour of mine called New York in the Time of George Washington, which, pre-pandemic, I used to lead every year around the time of Washington’s birthday. The scope of this one, however, will be a bit broader, as we search for reminders of the colonial past and focus on other important personages such as Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and Pierre L’Enfant. This takes place in lower Manhattan, beginning at City Hall Park and ending at Bowling Green.
ARCHITECTURE OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Link
7/20 Monday 1:00–3:00
The Met is one of the world’s greatest art museums, and comprises a staggering two million square feet of floor area. It is also one of New York’s great buildings, first opened at its present location in 1880 and added to constantly ever since, most notably with the central section of the Fifth Avenue front between 1894 and 1902. We will examine the building both outside and in. On the outside, we will walk around the perimeter, with looks at the Fifth Avenue front (which was extended by McKim, Mead & White), and around the sides and back to see the numerous additions put on in the 1970s and 1980s. Inside, we will look at some of the principal spaces: the Great Hall, the Medieval Sculpture Hall (which remains from Vaux and Mould’s original 1880 building), the Petrie European Sculpture Court, the Roman Sculpture Court, and more.
In Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, set around the time of the Met’s opening in Central Park, Ellen and Newland meet in what is now the Medieval Sculpture Hall. Here’s what Wharton wrote:
Avoiding the popular “Wolfe collection,” whose anecdotic canvases filled one of the main galleries of the queer wilderness of cast-iron
and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museum, they had wandered down a passage to the room where the “Cesnola antiquities” mouldered in
unvisited loneliness.They had this melancholy retreat to themselves, and seated on the divan enclosing the central steam-radiator, they were staring silently at the
glass cabinets mounted in ebonised wood which contained the recovered fragments of Ilium.“It’s odd,” Madame Olenska said, “I never came here before.”
“Ah, well—. Some day, I suppose, it will be a great Museum.”
“Yes,” she assented absently.
By the way, those “anecdotic canvases” and some of the “Cesnola antiquities” may still be seen in the Met.
And the SAS has listed these, tours to be determined:
Mystery Tour with Francis Morrone
Link
8/5 Wednesday 2:00–3:30
Mystery Tour with Francis Morrone
Link
8/19 Wednesday 2:00–3:30
At New York University’s School of Professional Studies I will be doing:
LONDON ON FILM
Link
6/18–8/6 Thursday 12:00–1:40
For much of the last 400 years or so, London was the most important city on earth, serving as the capital of a vast global empire, the world’s greatest financial center, and the world’s most populous city. Even today, London competes with New York for top “world city” status. How has London been captured on film? If not as “cinegenic” as Paris, London is nonetheless as iconic and as interesting as any city, and it has drawn the attention of the movies as much as any city. We will view and discuss a range of representations of London, both historical and contemporary, by directors both British and foreign, as we search for what film has been able to tell us about this great city.
This course is offered by Zoom, and the classes will be recorded.
Recommendations:
For those of you who are interested in the things I am interested in, there are four must-see exhibitions in New York right now.
Raphael: Sublime Poetry, Metropolitan Museum of Art, through June 28
In her novella “False Dawn” (part of the 1924 tetralogy Old New York), set in the 1840s, Edith Wharton tells the story of a father and his son. The father is Halston Raycie, a rich New Yorker with a Hell Gate estate. He sends his son, Lewis, on the Grand Tour to Europe, supplied with money to purchase pictures for the Raycie Heirloom Gallery that the father wishes to be part of his legacy. Halston instructs Lewis to buy paintings by Carlo Dolci, “Lo Spagnoletto” (Jusepe de Ribera), Domenichino, Guercino, Guido Reni, Salvator Rosa, Carlo Maratti, and other artists—mostly 17th century—admired at the time. If possible, father tells son, buy a Raphael—the painter whose works are the standard by which paintings by all other artists are to be judged. At the time, Raphael was considered to be, quite simply, the greatest painter who had ever lived. While in Switzerland, Lewis makes the acquaintance of a dreamy young Englishman named John Ruskin. Ruskin, who in that decade established himself as the most formidable art critic in Britain, tells Lewis that the painters he’s after are all second-rate. Instead, Ruskin says, Lewis should seek works by earlier painters, uncorrupted by the false standards established by the High Renaissance. Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Carpaccio, and Fra Angelico are some of the painters Ruskin prefers to the sterile perfection of Raphael and those who followed him. Lewis, spellbound by Ruskin’s passionate views about art, stocks up on “Italian Primitives,” as they were once called. Upon Lewis’s return to New York, his father is appalled by the barbarous daubs (as he calls a painting by Fra Angelico) his son has accumulated. The shock hastens Halston’s death, but not until he has disowned his son. Lewis later dies a broken man. The twist is that not long after, the paintings he had acquired are now widely admired (not least through Ruskin’s influence)—and command the highest sale prices. The story reminds us that modern taste was not just a taste for modern art, but also a rethinking of past art. The British artists known as the Pre-Raphaelites, who admired Ruskin (and who are mentioned in False Dawn), were clearly not down with the whole Raphael-King-of-the-Painters thing. They preferred Jan van Eyck. The consensus around the High Renaissance was breaking apart. I think Edith’s own taste was closer to that of the father than of the son. (She herself, who had grown up on Ruskin, was a central figure in the anti-Ruskin revaluation of 17th-century painting.) You can do the comparison right in the Met. In Gallery 620 is Carlo Dolci’s superb portrait of Saint Philip Neri, from 1645 or 1646. I’d take this for my own Heirloom Gallery any day. Also in Gallery 620 are works by Salvator Rosa (Bandits on a Rocky Coast, 1655–60) and Guido Reni (Charity, c. 1630). In Gallery 640 are oil-on-copper works by Domenichino (The Lamentation, 1603) and Carlo Maratti (The Flight into Egypt, c. 1664). As for “Lo Spagnoletto,” his Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria (1648), in Gallery 624, is, in my opinion, one of the Met’s greatest treasures. On the Ruskin side of the ledger one may view Mantegna’s The Adoration of the Shepherds (“shortly after 1450”) in Gallery 606, Giotto’s The Adoration of the Magi (c. 1320) in Gallery 601, Carpaccio’s The Meditation on the Passion (c. 1490) in Gallery 606, and Fra Angelico’s The Crucifixion (c. 1420–23) in Gallery 603.
Personally, I feel no need to take sides. I like all these paintings. But the comparison is a fun exercise in coming to grips with the history of taste.
As for Raphael, the Met—and New York—has ever had only the one painting, the Colonna Altarpiece, courtesy of J.P. Morgan. With this exhibition, we get the once-in-a-lifetime chance to see Raphael in quantity. Be sure to look at the drawings, which are fantastic, and the portraits—for example, the superb portrait (c. 1514–15) of Baldassare Castiglione, from the Louvre. In all his works, Raphael had a preternatural ability to achieve a perfect serenity, an otherworldly calmness and balance. There are no showy effects, and none of the animus that led Michelangelo to wish to tear it all down. These paintings are the best tonic for troubled souls. The great historian Jacob Burckhardt, in his Cicerone (first pubished in German in 1855, in English in 1873), a guidebook to Italian art, wrote of Raphael (his favorite artist): “the forms are entirely beautiful, noble, and at the same time animated without harm to the whole. No detail obtrudes or crowds forward; the artist precisely understands the delicate life of his symbolic subjects, and knows how easily the separately interesting drowns the whole.”
And by all means read the splendid “False Dawn,” which is available for free from Project Gutenberg.
Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture, Frick Collection, through May 25
A choice exhibition of portraits drawn from a wide variety of collections attesting to the genius of the artist who may be my favorite British painter. (Sadly, none of his portraits of his daughters is included.)
For those who, as I do, love architectural drawings, there are two important exhibitions.
Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship, Metropolitan Museum of Art, through July 19
Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds, Bard Graduate Center, through May 24
Some of you know how often in my lectures and classes I contrive to show slides of drawings by Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79), the great French architect, theoretician, and restorer of Medieval monuments (including Notre-Dame de Paris). In that golden age of architectural drawing, no one surpassed Viollet-le-Duc.
Finally, be sure to see Brick and Stone: Landmarking Our Lower East Side Heritage, an exhibition of large photo banners set up along the fence of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center at 107 Suffolk Street (at Rivington Street) from May 1 to June 30. The exhibition highlights twelve buildings and two historic districts proposed for landmark designation by the exhibition’s sponsor, the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative. The principal research for this was done by my friend Deborah Wye.
This was issue #18 of Francis Morrone. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or view this email online.
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