Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Neither Emily nor I have been to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and since we had the day off together, we decided to check it out.

This sounds like a simple thing on the surface: Emily and Dylan head off to the museum together and enjoy fine arts. In reality, we spent an embarrassing amount of time wandering around Boston’s Back Bay looking like especially bewildered tourists, even with the aid of Emily’s tricorder-ish phone.

But! We actually did make it to the museum, about five minutes before we would have succumbed to heat stroke. And it was worth it, if only because I got to see this painting:

That’s not to say there weren’t other amazing things there. It’s just…really hard to top a classical painting of a cat wearing a dress. We also saw the usual assortment of Egyptian relics, 18th century American furniture and busts of some truly grumpy Romans.

One area that the Museum of Fine Arts really excels in their presentation. They did their best to minimize the boundaries between the viewer and the art. When we went to look at the various stone panels with the Egyptian hieroglyphs, they had mounted them inside a dimly lit corridor, so that we felt like we were actually in a tomb, looking at millennial-old artifacts.

The same was true of the early American furniture, which was arranged in rooms like they would have been in the 18th and 19th centuries. There was only a shin-high guardrail to keep people from walking into the rooms, which didn’t obstruct our view at all. It was possible, with a little bit of effort, to imagine that you were looking into someone’s dining room.

They’re also hosting an exhibition of Chihuly‘s art right now, and it’s some truly impressive stuff. Take a gander at terrible iPod photographs:

He does amazing things with glass, stuff that looks other-worldly and alien. It’s glass at its most organic and I highly recommend checking it out in person if you ever get the chance, since the pictures don’t really do it justice.

We didn’t check out all of the museum; to do so would take a whole day and some change. We left a lot of it for another time and I’m glad we’ll be in Boston long enough to do so.

Dylan Charles