Birthday Museum Trip

Like I mentioned in my last post, my big birthday plans centered on a museum visit. It ended up being a more laid back day than I was originally planning, but on the day, that's just what we felt like doing. Aside from booking the museum trip, I just didn't feel like making all sorts of plans and having to figure things out so we decided to wing it. Luckily, it turned out to be a great day and an overall nice, relaxing weekend.

The museum I landed on was the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. I decided to choose something closer to home than my first choice,  MASS MoCA, as we thought that it would be more fun to visit when we could make a whole weekend out of it. That left a few other choices but I ultimately wanted to try something new. I'm happy to report that I was not disappointed. 

And now for the photo dump...

If you were to google this museum, you'd get hit with a ton of pictures of it's courtyard. It's a large, 3 story tall glass roofed observatory filled with an amazing array of plants that, so the audio tour told us, are swapped out every few weeks- if you look close, you'll notice that the vast majority of the plants are in pots.

The rest of the museum was filled with an eclectic mix of art from all over the world, collected by Ms Gardner (1840-1924) with the help of various artist friends and experts, including pieces from some old masters as well as work that would be considered modern for her time.

 Her occupation is listed as "philanthropist" which is basically a nice way to say she had a lot of time and money on her hands, hence the museum. She seems like she was quite the lady though, doing her own thing and successfully chasing her dream of creating this museum at a time when that was most definitely not something a woman would commonly do.

She was extremely hands-on with the creation of the museum and in her will, left strict instructions to leave it as-is. She specifically wanted it to be a place where you go to feel the art and come to your own conclusions, which is why there are no placards giving info on any of the works. I love this idea in theory but M and I are the kind of people that enjoy taking hours to go through museums reading every little thing- luckily, these an audio tour for people like us.

This is a Raphael (no, not this Raphael). I loved the colors.

The walls here are covered in painted leather panels- the dark parts are tarnished silver. Think about how gloriously shiny that would've been!

A Botticelli.

This little alcove is a good example of how eclectic her collection was.

This museum initially got on my radar by hearing about the theft of 13 paintings in 1990 (there's going to be a Netflix docuseries about it in April!) and I was interested to find that they kept the empty frames up as  a sign of hope for their eventual return. Classical painting isn't my number one favorite but it's hard not to be a little awed seeing some of these and feeling the loss of the stolen work. 

Below that painting by Manet, was another piece by him called Chez Tortoni.

Those frame used to contain 2 paintings by Rembrandt, including his only known seascape, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee (look at the light in that one!!).

That's a self portrait of Rembrandt as a young man, now gazing across the room at the empty frames of some of his later great work.

We topped off our classy museum visit (I even wore a dress, which doesn't often happen) with... good beer and tacos. And games (except I lost)! A good day hits all those important notes- classy, laid back, fun. A successful start to my 32nd year, I'd say.