Let's get medieval

There were so many cool things at the Philadelphia Art Museum and I know I only saw a fraction of them in my whirlwind trip. For one thing, there were three other locations with even more stuff, including the Rodin Museum, and the Perelman Building, which appears to have all sorts of modern collections, including costumes and clothes.

One of the coolest things I did get to see were all the little rooms that have been brought from actual castles and manors and temples and so on and reconstructed at the museum. This is the ceiling of a small chapel-like room (can't find the specific room in the collection database, but others are there). The rooms that are complete with furnishing give you a real sense of what it was like to live in a medieval manor house, or a German monastery.

I like this painting of St. Catherine of Alexandria for several reasons. First, she is reading a book; second, she is standing in front of Bruges, and it has a special place in my heart since we were there last year; and third, she is totally standing on the pagan emperor who killed her. Awesome. I didn't spend too much time in the medieval/Renaissance painting rooms because a lot of it was similar to all the art we saw last year in Europe. If I had been there longer I probably would have spent more time there. But I wanted to make sure I got to see the other cool stuff:

Like 14th and 15th century swords. While I was in Philadelphia (and for a month afterwards) I was listening to A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman's history of 14th century France, and was excited to see things that came from that time and place. I also saw later dueling-type swords, but these were true war swords.

And where there are swords, there must be shields and armor. I decided not to try your patience with the (many) pictures of horse armor I took (not sure what I was thinking at the time other than "horsies, in armor!"), but this shield is amazing. All that detail, all done by hand without any modern tools or computer renderings or anything. So. Much. Detail.

If you ever have a chance to go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, do it. It definitely belongs in the same class as the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, and the Smithsonian, and the British Museum.

Next time, I will turn to the sights of Colonial America at Constitution Hall.

Poppies and Puppies

Here are some more pictures from my visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I love Rookwood Pottery, and I love poppies, so I would love to have this vase. My picture doesn't really do the colors justice. This one from the museum is much better.

Yes, another poppy vase. One thing I really like about Arts & Crafts era vases and lamps is that so much of the work was done by women artisans. Like this one. They didn't really get famous, like their male counterparts, but they were there, and they are documented, some of them at least, and they did lovely work.

This little guy was just about my favorite item in the entire museum. And he is really old - 3rd century CE - just goes to show that even the ancient Chinese liked their cute dogs.

And the Japanese, in the 18th century.

So did the Koreans. This adorable little puppy (who looks an awful lot like puppy Miikka) is from the 16th century.

Tomorrow - Medieval European art and artifacts.

Philadelphia Museum of Art

See the folks getting their wedding pictures done?

So, back to Philadelphia and the art museum. Not only does it have cool statues around it, it also has art inside - imagine that!  And even better, they allow photography, as long as you don't use a flash. So what follows are some of my pictures from inside the museum (well, after this one and the next one which are both outside). I had less than an hour and a half to see the museum, and the steep price of admission (which I was happy to pay to support art etc, just not more than once in a week) meant that I couldn't come back later to see what I had missed. And thus began a whirlwind journey through some of the treasures of the world.

OK, so we are still outside for this one. But isn't it cool? They have painted the frieze so that it looks much like architectural historians speculate Greek and Roman temples really would have looked like - not the plain white marble we are used to seeing. (I know, this escapes the column, and as much as I want to give you the best picture possible, I am not good at coloring outside the lines, so this makes me anxious. But art needs to be seen, so I am going to ignore that feeling. I think I need a wider column...)

I honestly have no idea who this is, since I didn't bother to take a picture of the identification. This is Mary Anne Heide Norris by Thomas Scully. I thought she had an interesting expression on her face. Look at the shine of the silk of her dress and the furriness of her stole. I am always blown away by the abilities of painters - there are very good reasons I stick to photography.

[Library-related Diversion for a moment: The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a really good example of a digital library for its art. You can search by artist, classification, origin of art etc. There are no limiters, so I couldn't search for Mary Anne by "painting NOT landscape," but that is sort of a minor quibble that probably doesn't come up for most scholars, since they would probably at least know the painter they are looking for. And they do have a social tagging feature, which allows casual visitors like me to help put more metadata on pictures. For instance, this painting did not come up under the social tag for "portrait," but when I found the painting through a more laborious search, I was then able to add "woman" and "portrait" to its list of social tags. Pretty cool. There are many examples of digital libraries that don't work all that well, so it is nice to find one that works. In all, I have been extremely impressed with the ease of searching for the art in Philadelphia and the information available. Okay, back to the art].

OK, coloring outside the lines for this one too.

This is Thomas Moran's Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. The play of light on the rocks is just right, what you actually do see when you are there. I have seen pictures of this painting in books before, and copies at art galleries in Sedona, so it was a little thrill to see the original in person.

I cannot find this armoire in the collection catalog, but I believe it is Pennsylvania German, since that was the group of furniture it was with. Sorry about the glare on the window in front. Anyway, there was quite a lot of interesting furniture, and apparently there was a lot more in one of the other branches of the museum. 

This jug made me laugh. I did manage to take a picture of the information about it (same as the info at the link), because I knew I would want to share it with you. And I have a friend who is a potter who used to live in Asheville, NC.

Next time - vases and ancient puppies - even 2000 years ago, people loved their puppy pictures!

Museums galore

There are so many museums in Washington D.C. that you would have to be insane to try to see them all in one trip. We certainly made a valiant effort, but since we are not insane, we didn't get to more than a fraction. The first afternoon, we visited the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum (not to be confused with the National Gallery of Art, which we also visited later in the trip, or any of the other American Art or National Galleries in D.C.).

Benjamin visited the Smithsonian Natural History Museum on his own one afternoon while I was at the ALA conference.  I went last year when I was in D.C. on my own, and figured that, being a natural history buff, he would want to spend a lot of time looking and wandering. And he did. I assume he saw this whale, since it is in the main hall and kind of hard to miss! (That picture is from my trip...he was too busy looking at the exhibits to remember to take pictures. The nerve...)

We visited the excellent American Indian Museum...where I was too busy looking at exhibits to take many pictures. And we stopped in at the National Air and Space Museum. That place was jammed, mostly with parents and children. Planes and such are rather interesting for children - go figure.

Anyway, we saw some of the museum, including the Spirit of St. Louis.  What is so strange about that plane to me is that there is no window in the front. I couldn't get a good picture of it, but Lindbergh would have had to stick his head out the side door or something to actually see...something confirmed by the Wikipedia article about the plane.

We also saw some of the space capsules and modules that were used in past space programs. It turns out that when they build the part that is going into space, they also build at least one back-up and/or training module. Those are what the museum has. So little! I think that my dreams of being an astronaut have been firmly squashed by the small size of the capsules and the design of the toilets (no pictures, sorry).

This one reminds me an awful lot of the Starbug used on Red Dwarf.

We didn't restrict ourselves to museums, of course. We also ate lots of good food. This was one of our favorite finds. A Mexican-style tapas restaurant. So very, very good.