Well, we're in D.C.
That was complicated.
For starters, we arrived in D.C about two hours ago. Yesterday was traffic from the bureaucratic depths of hell, so that after twelve hours driving straight, we were still in the suburbs of Philadelphia. There went all the mix CDs I made for the trip. So we spent the night in Chadds Ford, which my parents remembered as orchards and farmland in the 1970's (and which has been built up rather more since then, although it still has country darkness and the intense shrill of cicadas), and most of today at the Brandywine River Museum and Longwood Gardens—this was, actually, wonderful. Just a little unscheduled.
The first of these places used to be a mill, so that its stairs wind up and around in slabs of granite and all its windows overlook a steady, silt-green loop of what I assume is the eponymous river; banked with stones and tumbledown bushes, and a pair of boys had gone swimming in the heat. The first two floors mostly feature locally-connected art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but its centerpiece is three generations of Wyeths: N.C., Andrew, and Jamie, plus associated students and family members. (For the same reason, there is a collection of illustrations by Howard Pyle, with whom N.C. Wyeth studied.) What impressed me most about the paintings of N.C. Wyeth was not how many I recognized from one children's book or another, but the size and vividness of the canvases—they are best viewed from across a room, not photorealistic but larger than life, rich as imagination, and against the dark-paneled wood they glow.* There was also a sort of self-portrait which I loved, painted not at all in his characteristic style: a dreamscape in which a shrewd and casual General George Washington leans down from his horse to converse with the startled artist, while around them famous battles are re-enacted in a skewed and luminous valley; the fruits of working on a much straighter historical scene, and perhaps Washington had turned up to set the record right. And I always forget how tactilely Andrew Wyeth paints; even light has a grain in his watercolors, dry as driftwood and as spare, even human flesh.
The second were created between 1906 and 1930 by Pierre du Pont—as in the chemical manufacturers; the company founded by his great-grandfather Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours, and that is a name that impresses me—and despite this time frame, Longwood Gardens still looks to me like a Victorian landscaping project, Central Park or the Boston Public Garden. There are rose trellises, water gardens, courts of flowers all in matched colors, forested walks, meadowland . . . I liked best the Conservatory, whose brownstone columns and skylights are artistically overgrown with fig-creepers and bougainvillea, tree-ferns and papyrus and oleander bedded all through the hall, and the sunken floor is flooded to reflect whatever plants overhang its marble flags.** There are pools dedicated to water lilies and lotuses, rising out of the blackened water like Egyptian illustrations. There is a topiary garden that changes with each season, mazed and formal; no stone children, but there should be. It was so hot that the air clung to our faces, and we all gazed wistfully at the fountains and their ornamental arches, but I was still glad to be near trees that were older than my grandparents. That much green shade and branches is as good as the sea for me.
And then in Delaware we discovered that the hotel had lost our reservation. And then in Maryland we ran into a thunderstorm. And my mother commented that she felt like a character in a Chevy Chase film. And I've read all of the books that I brought for this trip, so someone had better point me in the direction of a good used book store. But we're here, and we're in a hotel, and I am going to fall over now. Tomorrow is another . . .
*In honor of the museum and the fact that his birthday was celebrated mostly trapped in traffic, I browsed their gift shop and got my brother a very nice hardcover of Treasure Island with all the original illustrations. He was delighted. We had been looking at the paintings upstairs and while I was assigned the book in seventh grade, he never seems to have read it—I think instead that was the year his class read Of Mice and Men and The Martian Chronicles and The Red Badge of Courage and was traumatized—so he had to ask me how all the various scenes fitted into the story, and I had to readjust my brain to the concept that "Long John Silver" was a name unknown to him. But he's looking forward to it, now that we're no longer on the road and he can read without worrying about carsickness, and I imagine he will find certain of its conventions (even if there are no krakens in Stevenson) already familiar. And we'll rent the film when we get home.
**I took multiple photographs. If I can ever pry the camera out of my brother's fingers, and I can get the hotel connection to hold steady, I shall upload as many as I can.
That was complicated.
For starters, we arrived in D.C about two hours ago. Yesterday was traffic from the bureaucratic depths of hell, so that after twelve hours driving straight, we were still in the suburbs of Philadelphia. There went all the mix CDs I made for the trip. So we spent the night in Chadds Ford, which my parents remembered as orchards and farmland in the 1970's (and which has been built up rather more since then, although it still has country darkness and the intense shrill of cicadas), and most of today at the Brandywine River Museum and Longwood Gardens—this was, actually, wonderful. Just a little unscheduled.
The first of these places used to be a mill, so that its stairs wind up and around in slabs of granite and all its windows overlook a steady, silt-green loop of what I assume is the eponymous river; banked with stones and tumbledown bushes, and a pair of boys had gone swimming in the heat. The first two floors mostly feature locally-connected art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but its centerpiece is three generations of Wyeths: N.C., Andrew, and Jamie, plus associated students and family members. (For the same reason, there is a collection of illustrations by Howard Pyle, with whom N.C. Wyeth studied.) What impressed me most about the paintings of N.C. Wyeth was not how many I recognized from one children's book or another, but the size and vividness of the canvases—they are best viewed from across a room, not photorealistic but larger than life, rich as imagination, and against the dark-paneled wood they glow.* There was also a sort of self-portrait which I loved, painted not at all in his characteristic style: a dreamscape in which a shrewd and casual General George Washington leans down from his horse to converse with the startled artist, while around them famous battles are re-enacted in a skewed and luminous valley; the fruits of working on a much straighter historical scene, and perhaps Washington had turned up to set the record right. And I always forget how tactilely Andrew Wyeth paints; even light has a grain in his watercolors, dry as driftwood and as spare, even human flesh.
The second were created between 1906 and 1930 by Pierre du Pont—as in the chemical manufacturers; the company founded by his great-grandfather Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours, and that is a name that impresses me—and despite this time frame, Longwood Gardens still looks to me like a Victorian landscaping project, Central Park or the Boston Public Garden. There are rose trellises, water gardens, courts of flowers all in matched colors, forested walks, meadowland . . . I liked best the Conservatory, whose brownstone columns and skylights are artistically overgrown with fig-creepers and bougainvillea, tree-ferns and papyrus and oleander bedded all through the hall, and the sunken floor is flooded to reflect whatever plants overhang its marble flags.** There are pools dedicated to water lilies and lotuses, rising out of the blackened water like Egyptian illustrations. There is a topiary garden that changes with each season, mazed and formal; no stone children, but there should be. It was so hot that the air clung to our faces, and we all gazed wistfully at the fountains and their ornamental arches, but I was still glad to be near trees that were older than my grandparents. That much green shade and branches is as good as the sea for me.
And then in Delaware we discovered that the hotel had lost our reservation. And then in Maryland we ran into a thunderstorm. And my mother commented that she felt like a character in a Chevy Chase film. And I've read all of the books that I brought for this trip, so someone had better point me in the direction of a good used book store. But we're here, and we're in a hotel, and I am going to fall over now. Tomorrow is another . . .
*In honor of the museum and the fact that his birthday was celebrated mostly trapped in traffic, I browsed their gift shop and got my brother a very nice hardcover of Treasure Island with all the original illustrations. He was delighted. We had been looking at the paintings upstairs and while I was assigned the book in seventh grade, he never seems to have read it—I think instead that was the year his class read Of Mice and Men and The Martian Chronicles and The Red Badge of Courage and was traumatized—so he had to ask me how all the various scenes fitted into the story, and I had to readjust my brain to the concept that "Long John Silver" was a name unknown to him. But he's looking forward to it, now that we're no longer on the road and he can read without worrying about carsickness, and I imagine he will find certain of its conventions (even if there are no krakens in Stevenson) already familiar. And we'll rent the film when we get home.
**I took multiple photographs. If I can ever pry the camera out of my brother's fingers, and I can get the hotel connection to hold steady, I shall upload as many as I can.
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