| Poem for Saturday |
[Dec. 31st, 2005|12:11 am] |
( Fetus Papyraceous )
Spent all of Friday in Baltimore. First we went to The American Dime Museum, which is closing indefinitely as of tomorrow due to funding issues, which of course meant that it was utterly mobbed today. The museum is in a rowhouse in a less-than-wonderful neighborhood away from the gentrifying downtown; there used to be a streetcar museum very near it, but that is closed as well. The American Dime Museum is partly a recreation of a 19th century dime museum with oddities -- some real, some faked -- and partly a tribute to the circus sideshow that grew out of such exhibitions, with such charming items as "the world's largest rat" (which appears to be a capibara to which someone attached a rubber tail), an "ancient Egyptian mummy" named In-Ho-Tation, a two-headed cow, an art display on the Inquisition, an alligator with the head of a woman, the state's largest rubberband ball, a model dummy to which people had stuck chewing gum and a live snakehead fish from a Maryland river. It's a very fun museum and I would recommend it for kitsch-lovers were it not closing.
From there we went to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where we had intended to eat a late lunch, as they serve high tea, but the dining room was booked for hours, so we walked through the park to Ruby Tuesday's to eat. Then we went through the wonderful Monet's London exhibition, which is about artists' images of the Thames and environs from the mid-1850s until just before World War I. Some of the Monet paintings of the Houses of Parliament have never been displayed in the US before, and there were works by a number of artists, including Tissot, Hassam, Whistler and Pissarro, focusing particularly on the bridges and the ships that passed by the Chelsea and Battersea districts. There was also a documentary video on the underground rivers of London and the Thames cleanup that resulted in the Embankment projects. It amazed me how little the view seemed to have changed between 100 years ago and last spring when we took the boat down the Thames from Greenwich; of course the Gherkin and the London Eye aren't in the artwork, but the fish market and Tower are popular and some of the illustrations showed the current bridges being built.
The BMA has collections of Matisse and Picasso, numerous modernists, some American landscape painters, decorative arts and crafts, miniature American rooms, a reasonable sampling of European art from the Renaissance to the present and a collection of tile mosaics from Antioch, so we spent quite a lot of time going through the museum (the kids were more receptive to the historical European art than they were the other day to the Wyeths; younger son in particular was quite chatty about the religious art, Anthony van Dyck's "Rinaldo and Armida" and all the Madonnas). Originally we had planned to go to the aquarium, which is open late this weekend, to see if we could get into the new Australia exhibit, but when we drove by the lines were still very long which meant crowds even though we likely could have gotten in as members, and the kids begged off, so we drove out of the city past the sunset over the USS Constellation and the bridges.
( There Is A Sucker Born Every Minute )
Dinner ended up being nearly as late as lunch. For Chanukah it was calendar night, but we also got Pirates of the Barbary Coast cards, and younger son lucked out and got the ultra-rare Jade Rebellion set with the Chinese pirates and junks, so he was thrilled about that. Speaking of ships, The Washington Post this morning had an article on Patrick O'Brian, "Sailing Under False Colors", with reviews of Tolstoy's The Making of the Novelist, 1914-1949 and the newly reprinted The Catalans. I figured there might be interested parties here.
![[info]](http://www.deadjournal.com:8080/userinfo.gif) fridayfiver: ( New Year, New You )
thefridayfive: ( New Year, New Music ) |
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