Valentine's Day in NYC

I went up to the Met to see the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition (having reached that CAA point when one want to see actual art work, not power points) - amd walking back, this sun dog, above the elms in Central Park, seemed like a perfect restaging of his fusion of the natural and the divine (minus the fir trees that, he was convinced, had a great deal to do with inspiring Gothic church architecture).  The show was terrific: go, if you can.

En route - more mundane kitschy Valentine's stuff, but surprisingly wound round construction scaffolding, all the same.

Every time I go to the Met I try and go and see something new - or that I haven't seen for a long time - and today it was Renaissance portraits.  This is Fra Filippo Lippi's Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement, from c. 1440 - the first surviving Italian double portrait, and surely highly suitable for Valentine's day.

Then Central Park again, walking back -

and a Valentine's Day dinner in - where else? - the Oyster Bar on Grand Central Station.  Admittedly we had to wait a very, very long time - let's say we had a 7 p.m. reservation, and the food arrived at 8.20 - and my fish was very, very cold (and yes! we got a comp on that, because of the wait and the far from ideal temperature when it arrived) - which made it a very cheap, but delicious martini.  The dinner company was pretty good, too.  I couldn't believe Alice had never eaten there before - such a longterm favorite spot of mine.