A trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

I don't think you can really appreciate art until you see the original works-especially paintings.  They just don't seem to reproduce well.  On a recent trip to the Met, I got up close and personal with a few works of art.  Notice (click to enlarge) the globs of paint as I zoom in on the detail in Vincent VanGogh's (1853-1890) "Sunflowers".  Look at the date in the corner,  painted 3 years before he died.

Here are a couple more...

This picture is called first steps and was painted while he was a voluntary patient at an asylum.  It was painted the year that he died.
As I walked around the corner of a room in the museum, I was freaked out as I saw this guy looking at me!  It was life sized, and I seriously had to take a second look.

It was painted by the French painter Edouard Manet in 1874...

Let me end with a Monet that I hadn't seen before...