Top: Morris Kantor, Baseball at Night from SAAM's collection. Middle: my photograph of an Oriole’s game. Bottom: Phillips, Marjorie, Night Baseball, 1951, Oil on canvas, 24 1/4 x 36 in.; 61.595 x 91.44 cm., Gift of the artist 1951 or 1952, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Last summer we blogged about how Morris Kantor played with perspective to fit a ballpark drama into his painting Baseball at Night, so I was fascinated to see Marjorie Phillips' painting Night Baseball on a recent trip to the Phillips Collection.
The essay on the Phillips site says that Mrs. Phillips went to Washington Senators games with her husband, museum founder Duncan Phillips, and often brought artist's materials to sketch with. This painting is of a particular game between the Senators and the New York Yankees in the summer of 1951. Joe DiMaggio is at bat and though I'm not a big baseball fan, even I recognize his lanky stance at the plate.
I can imagine Mrs. Phillips sitting in the stands with a beer and hot dog, enjoying a pleasant summer evening, casually working out the lines and forms of the game on a sketch pad. Even though the cropping and perspective are different, her painting is very much like the photograph I took at the Orioles' game last year, and it's different than Kantor's painting, but not as different as I thought when I started writing this post. My eye keeps comparing the paintings and finding pleasure in the similarities—the lights, the diamond, the crouches of the players, and the coiled energy of the moment before the pitch. I wonder what the paintings would have been like if the artists had been able to switch places: Marjorie Phillips watching a game in a rural ballpark in 1934 and Morris Kantor in the stands in the nation's capital in 1951.
Follow up: There's some speculation about whether nor not Marjorie Phillips was a beer-and-hot-dog kind of gal. Though it would be easy to guess no, something about her paintings make me think she might have enjoyed a few simple pleasures. And as Humphrey Bogart said "A hot dog at the ball park is better than steak at the Ritz."
