Art: Versailles in Manhattan

One of the biggest, most elaborate and most thoroughly forgotten paintings in American history is heading for a comeback. A 165-ft. panorama of the palace and gardens at Versailles, painted in two CinemaScope-like sections, it is being installed this week in a specially built circular room in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. Versailles is a masterwork of sobersided, redheaded John Vanderlyn (1775-1852), a painter deeply admired in his youth, deeply pitied in old age, and deeply buried in the textbooks after his death. The picture's new home at the Met should do much to rescue...

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