For once you've planted children, you're absolutely stuck

[sovay]

For Mother's Day, we took my mother to the Sackler Museum at Harvard and then to dinner at Brasserie JO. There were snails in garlic butter and paintings from Isfahan. The maître d' gave her an African violet in a pot. We came home and watched several episodes of Night Court. I am given to understand today was a success.

Comments

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Most excellent. Give her my fond regards.

Nine

[sovay]

Most excellent.

It turns out you can get into the Sackler for free with the card for the Museum of Comparative Zoology; the other two museums are still under renovation, but this one is currently hosting a medley of artistic exhibitions, including a terrific one on the fourth floor which groups artworks by theme rather than time, so that in a room full of red-figure krateres and coins from Syracuse and a pair of lion-headed deities from Egypt, you look up the wall from the sarcophagus and there's Franz von Stuck's Wounded Amazon (1905). Madonnas and children are intermingled with twilit Whistler mistscapes and two different takes on Aeneid 1.124—156 by Rubens, Burne-Jones' Pan and Psyche (1872) is across the gallery from Gustave Moreau's Le jeune homme et la Mort (1856/65). I want to take up semi-permanent residence and write poems for them, except the poems wouldn't be as good as the art.

(My favorite painting was not Greco-Roman; it was Riza 'Abbasi's Nashmi the Archer (1630), to be found on the second floor with a number of other paintings from seventeenth-century Isfahan. I loved that in among the beautiful, rather idealized miniatures of men and women with calligraphic faces and clothes as delicately or glowingly tinted as enamels, we get suddenly a slipshod, slouchy, slightly stoned ex-professional soldier:



Fortunately, he was available as a postcard, as was the second-century Roman-style Chinese horse my mother fell in love with. More imagines for the shrine.)

Give her my fond regards.

I have already done so. The same to your mother.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I am given to understand today was a success.

I'm delighted to hear this.

[sovay]

I'm delighted to hear this.

I shall tell my mother.

[larryhammer]

How does that Sackler Museum compare to the Sackler Gallery that's part of the Smithsonian?

[sovay]

How does that Sackler Museum compare to the Sackler Gallery that's part of the Smithsonian?

It's the same Arthur M. Sackler, if that's what you're asking. I haven't spent substantial enough time in either museum to tell you much about their respective qualities.

[larryhammer]

The Freyer-Sackler (really one museum kept separate by separate founders) is my favorite Smithsonian, though I actually spent more time in Natural History, growing up. It's the oriental art central, with bonus Too Much James Whistler in the Freyer half.

---L.

[sovay]

It's the oriental art central, with bonus Too Much James Whistler in the Freyer half.

I've been to the Freer and Sackler Galleries; just not more than twice in my life, I think. The Museum of Natural History was my native inclination, too.

[larryhammer]

I still deeply miss the gallery in the Natural History of Really Pretty Pieces of Nature that they took down to make way for the Imax theater. Iridescent red hummingbird feather headdress! A wall of morphos! crynoid tracks in limestone!

Ah, well. Sic transit gloria nostalgia.

---L.

[sovay]

I still deeply miss the gallery in the Natural History of Really Pretty Pieces of Nature that they took down to make way for the Imax theater.

Wait, what? When?

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

They took all the taxidermied specimens down. You can sometimes find them by the bathrooms in linoleumed corridors. The childre nowadays are frightened of them. Thanks for the mother's day wishes, btw!