art and octopi's

About sundown – weirdly early – Gay and I took a combination of subways out to the Museum of Fine Arts stop.  But we didn't go to the MFA this time.  Instead we went across town a bit, to the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum.

  

We met Dayton visitors Becca and Guy, and had dinner in the museum café.  Very delicious.  I had frog legs fried in a light batter and, on a whim, a glass of icy Gewurtztraminer.  Lovely combination.

The museum has a very quirky collection.  From Wiki -- After her husband John L. Gardner’s death in 1898, Isabella Gardner realized their shared dream of building a museum for their treasures. She purchased land for the museum in the marshy Fenway area of Boston, and hired architect Willard T. Sears to build a museum modeled on the Renaissance palaces of Venice. Gardner was deeply involved in every aspect of the design, though, leading Sears to quip that he was merely the structural engineer making Gardner's design possible. After the construction of the building was complete, Gardner spent a full year carefully installing her collection in a way that evokes intimate responses to the art, mixing paintings, furniture, textiles and objects from different cultures and periods among well-known European paintings and sculpture.

A wonderful surprise was the number of John Singer Sargent paintings –I recently got that book Sargent's Women and devoured it; several of the best paintings in that book are here.  There's even a picture of Sargent painting Mrs. Gardner.

There are important pieces by Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Vermeer, and Michelangelo. A Rembrandt self-portrait at age 23 is particularly arresting.

The paintings are hung without identifying labels, but each room has a box of laminated guides.

The layout of the museum is itself a dramatic work of art.  At night the light level is low and quiet; during the day a central skylight would make it more dramatic.  Have to go back next year during the day. 

Next time, start at the top and go down; they announced closing time just as we finished the second level, so we can look forward to seeing the third floor.

The museum book store was even more seductive than most.  I had to part with $40 and get a book called Sketchtravel – a reproduction of a handmade book, about 12"X8.5", which has drawings and watercolors by seventy-one artists.  It was passed by hand, never mailed, from one to the next over five years.  Seventy-one artists in 75,000 miles.  Most of the pictures are quirky cartoons; many quite stunning.

I plucked it out of a window display, and after a couple of pages knew I had to have it.  It will be my main coffeetable book for awhile.

For the sake of marine biologists in the crowd, in LiveJournal I'll add a picture of the snow octopus we saw melting in the grass outside the museum.

Joe