We spent a very nice New Year's eve with our friends Bob and Nona. Very casual, we went to supper at our neighborhood Chinese restaurant, Shanghai Garden. Normally closed on Sundays (family values), Rae and his sisters decided to open on New Year's eve. We expect, when we walked into the restaurant at 7 p.m., that we would be one of very few customers, since (a) customers would not expect SG to be open on a Sunday, and (b) who would go to a neighborhood Chinese restaurant on New Year's eve?
It turned out that the place was packed (I think to the surprise of the staff and perhaps the dismay of the kitchen). The food as usual was good. We had egg rolls and quick fried eggplant slices with scallions as appetizers, while for main dishes there were salmon with Hunan sauce, du bien tofu (I am not sure what makes it du bien; it sits above a flame on a chafing dish, and is an off-menu choice), chicken and sauteed spinach, and a seafood and vegetable soup that Nona had.
Afterwords, back at the house for dessert (Edie had made a chocolate something or other that everyone loved and I stayed away from) and champagne (again I just said no), and to look at our pictures from Hawaii (where I realized how quickly I had forgotten some of the names and references).
Our guests left about 11, and we wound up watching the William Hurt/Kathleen Turner movie "Body Heat", while I thumbed through this extraordinary photography book I picked up a couple of months ago by the photographer Donald Robinson. The book is called "In Harmony With Nature".
There was an additional highlight of our 12/31. We had gone down to the National Gallery to see the Constable exhibit on its last day. Constable painted in England during the first third of the 19th century, specially in very large (his six foot paintings) canvasses showing landscapes mostly near his area of birth, northeast of London. Virtually all of his large work is in England (the Tate, National Gallery and Royal Academy), with only once painting hanging normally in Washington, and one at the British Art Museum at Yale.
His procedure was unique as, in addition to making pencil sketches of his subject areas, he painted full size oil sketches. This exhibit was the first to bring together all of his six foot paintings along with all of the sketches. He had apparently kept the sketches, which look to have been painted much more quickly, although they themselves are worthy of attention. It was interesting to see the small changes he made from sketch to final product, not only in subject matter (moving a tree, adding a person, etc.), but in tone and coloration. His sense of composition was excellent.
His life sounded far from perfect. Born to a fairly well to do family, he seems to have gone through good and bad times economically, and his wife, with whom he was obviously very close, died young of tuberculosis, putting him into somewhat of a tailspin. He died, it said unexpectedly, at 60.
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