a day at the Met

Such a beautiful day in NYC: a touch of autumn; a blue sky with fluffy clouds, and I walked over 17,000 steps, I find - up to the Met from midtown; a day looking largely at C19th American art, and taking many, many photos of details that I can use in teaching and maybe research (now I have a crazy number of close-ups of lichen on rocks and tree trunks), and seeing various images I didn't know at all, like this British portrait by William Wood of Joanna de Silva (1792), which the Met bought last year (Joanna was a nursemaid in the family of an officer with the British East India Company, 

or Charles Calverley's relief portrait of Little Ida (1869) - which he revised in 1889 to bear the inscription "The Race John Brown Died for," thus turning her into a representative rather than an individual ,..

and then just so many things I'd not really seen before.  Of course I knew there's a cat in Henry Mosler's Just Moved (1870) - but I hadn't previously seen that it's kept from straying from its new residence by a piece of string that ties it to a tin tub.