This weekend was grand (only a personal level, obviously - Norway's horrifying attacks were utterly shocking and saddening, to put it mildly. But this is a vintage blog so I will keep it peppy), especially since today the heat wave cleared up and it was a tolerable 80-ish degrees!
Saturday was the last day (fingers crossed!) of the heat, but it was really bad and I was fed up with suffocating in my apartment with no A/C, so I headed out to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, partly to escape the heat, but mainly since I'd been meaning to go to the museum since I got to Boston.
And boy, am I glad I didn't leave it to the last minute! Because I definitely need to make at least one trip back there, it was so huge I missed out on one and a half floors and the Chihuly exhibit because the museum closed before I was finished!
And I had a nice encounter with a stranger - I was staring at Victorian-era American painting when a young Irish fella came up to me and asked me if I had any experience with time travel. I took it as a compliment (even though he said I looked like I was out of the 50s, when technically my hair and outfit pointed to mid-late 40s, but hey, I won't be persnickety lol) and we started chatting, and exchanged numbers. Eventually, after the museum closed, we got coffee at a nearby cafe. It was a pleasant day, and good stranger-meeting events always put me in a good mood and make me feel like the general friendliness of the past isn't totally dying out (I read this article a few months ago that was on the Yahoo front page about how research shows most American young people think it's creepy/inappropriate to talk to strangers, which makes me sad because how else are you supposed to meet people outside of your normal circle??)
And then today I went out to a vintage shop I hadn't yet visited - and it was a success! More on that tomorrow, when I'll post some recent finds.
Anyway, I thought I'd post just a very few of my favorite parts of the museum that I saw - it was really difficult to narrow it down, but here's a few nice pieces that I found images of on the MFA website (except for the first two images).
 |
| "Stream in the Forest Near Plombieres" (1870s) by Francois Louis Francais. I don't know why I liked this so much - I mean, it is beautiful, way more so in person, but usually I'm drawn to paintings/art of people. But I just stood in front of this one for at least five full minutes, feeling really weird. After a bit I realized that I think part of it was that at that moment, even though I was enjoying the museum, I so badly wanted to be there, in that forest, by the stream, alone, with a picnic blanket and a cool breeze, to just lie there for ages - it would be perfect happiness. Hah, okay, mushy ramblyness over. |
 |
| "The Haymaker and the Sleeping Girl" (1785) by Thomas Gainsborough. This one was pretty, and the description accompanying it was interesting, talking about the social context of it and whatnot. |
One of my favorite exhibits - the instrument room. There were such fantastical things in there, they seemed like only art objects, too visually appealing to also be capable of producing beautiful sounds as well!
 |
Of course, I got excited about the few fashion prints I saw here and there throughout the museum:
And some pretty ceramics/porcelain in the European art section!
I love the Boston MFA! It was one of my favorite places there. Boston is such a great city. I'm glad you got a break in your heatwave!
ReplyDelete