I'm Martin Powers. It's Saturday, April 18th. This is a bonus episode of Post Reports.

My wife saw a plate of cupcakes on Instagram and freaked out. It was our first week of social

distancing. And to her, the little cakes covered in promiscuous sprinkles seemed far too

close together for comfort. Cupcakes lose a lot of their appeal, though, if you isolate them on

separate little sources. Sebastian's me is an art critic for the post, and like the rest of us,

he and his family have been practicing social distancing. And he had an idea for how we can all get

lost in art to feel a little bit less alone right now. We asked him to read his story for you here.

Over the past few weeks, I've heard people repeatedly declare that they feel like figures in an

Edward Hopper painting. Who can't relate? The world has surely never experienced so much enforced

solitude on such a scale. I've thought not just of Hopper, but also Wilhelm Hammershoi, a late 19th

century Danish painter who painted haunting interiors in shades of grey, emptied of everything

except single-citters seen from behind. And also Casper David Friedrich, that master of solitary

walkers and passive window gazes. But my wife's cupcake anxiety, okay, she was mainly joking,

made me wonder too about how we're all feeling these days about images of crowds, about pictures

of togetherness, conviviality, and mingling pheromones. Most of us have camera rolls filled with

party photos, Thanksgiving tables, or crowded beach scenes. Now they're liable to induce size,

if we can even bear to look at them. But what about their painted equivalents?

Washington is blessed to be home to two of the more famous party paintings in art history.

The Phillips Collection has Renoir's luncheon of the birding party, and the National Gallery has

money's masked ball at the opera. Extroverts both these canvases are probably feeling

full-own and out of sorts right now, but with the galleries closed since mid-March. So it might be

a good time to reach out to them. The Renoir, one of the world's most beloved paintings,

...