A few days ago, when the wrapping paper and ribbons finally stopped swirling overhead, I opened my Boston travel folder. I depart on January 5th. Never have I ever been so glad I have my plan in place, my luggage listed, my day-to-day schedule filled out.
I spent that evening split between reading The Memory Palace of Isabella Steward Garner and Googling up images of the artworks she referenced.  The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner is really about trying to write a biography of someone who burned her private letters and diaries. One review aptly called it ‘a meditation on art and personality’ and does tie ISG’s life and the author’s ideas about her to individual pieces in the museum. One of the unanswered mysteries is why ISG placed certain objects in proximity to others. I personally like the eccentricity of her choices, but I wish I had a detailed audio guide or podcast to download on that topic. The book is more speculation than anything, but it got my imagination fired up.
I did the math, and I will save a little bit of money and time if I join the MFA rather than purchase tickets, so that got done. I may not have joined in time for the card to reach me in the mail, but my membership started from the moment I clicked the Pay Now button. My confirmation email should get me a temporary card for each day, like a temporary driver’s license. I can’t wait to see Auomedon in action again.

Pondering whether to make reservations at the museum dining rooms or just show up on the day and do it first thing.  Keeping my fingers crossed there are no snowstorms of the century during my brief visit.

Easy breezy ride to the airport. Booked an aisle seat on a three seat row, ended up the only one on my row. Urbered into the city and given a complimentary upgrade to a suite upon check in.

It’s got bags of charm, a feeling of intimacy and those quirks I prize about boutique hotels, worth putting up with minimal outlets, no place to put your toiletries in the bathroom, and folding crane bedside lamps with enough lumens to perform surgery.

Ubered straight to the ISG. On impulse turned left into the artist in residence gig. Visitors were encouraged to draw on a large board, reminding me of Emily’s Collabadoodle days. The artist, Maurizio Cannavacciulo, handed me a print ‘for inspiration’ that resembled a cross between Gauguin islander children and a Japanese woodblock. Adored the pencil he gave me, which made a gorgeous black; not having an eraser, not so much. The artist was a skinny, bald gnome of an elderly Italian. “Do what you like, decapitate them,” he chortled. Oh, artists. Urk. No. Still, had an unexpected deeply pleasurable quarter of an hour, focused on hand/eye.

Walked into the heart of Fenway Court, just as the dusk deepened to violet.

Such a gorgeous, haunting time of day.
The lingering impressions were still in the details. Found my gilt-over-iron pair of bears, just as marvelous as I remembered.

A unicorn battling a dragon carved into a stone mantle.

This pair of Isabella’s purple silk shoes, narrow as blade, small enough for a grammar school child.

Given my pleasure in romance novels, this book cover.

This little sketch below the glorious Europa.

Like music that makes you want to dance, this makes me want to draw and etch.

Loved watching the light shift, examining the architectural fragments and speculating on the why of their juxtaposition. Fell in love all over again with the panels of drawings and the surprises of scale. And all those virgins holding their doomed children. I wonder if she found consolation in their sacrifice that echoed her own loss.

Fenway court itself breathes, still alive. Some of the groupings, especially the cases of yellowed, faded letters under glass, feel moldering and static. Without a readable text to consult, like the pressed rose from Browning’s funeral bier they are brittle memento mori.

Went room by room and up floor by floor until 5pm, then my eyes and energy gave out.

Collapsed into a chair in Café G and ripped through the tasting menu – tiny albeit delicious morsels. By then my feet ached even sitting down and my eyes felt boiled. Long day. Urbered back crawled into bed, typed this up and conked out.

PART TWO
After lunch, I threw myself into the arms of W. M. Chase. The first room was multiple views of his studio, filled with luxury textiles, object d’art, the various exotica he used for props, and the women he liked to paint. His self-portrait – with rumpled hair, and a truly luxuriant mustache – has a glowing saffron background and a nonchalant dash of red.

Whistler befriended Chase, but their association ended after Chase’s’s portrait of him. Like Velasquez’s of Innocent X , it was apparently troppo vero.

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Chase’s wife, daughters and female students often posed for him. The painting of his daughters playing ringtoss compares unfavorably to Sargents’s brooding The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, but hey, the Indian yellows and phthalo blues in Chase’s portrait of Dora Wheeler are the definition of lush, and his nudes are as tempting as Bourgereau’s.This exhibition has many paintings of his studio, his students and his family, and his focus on the pleasures of daily life endeared him to me.

Around 4pm it was time to sit and pulled out my sketchbook. I plonked myself on the comfortable couch in front of Washington and sketched the answer to one of the first jokes I ever heard (What color was George Washington’s white horse?). Fell into drawing for, it turned out, over an hour. When a voice spoke over my shoulder I jumped. It was the guard going off his shift, wanting to see what I’d been doing. He approved. I was not so happy.Upstairs to cruise the Sargents. I fervently hope his life gave him as much happiness as his work has given me. Paused in front of a oil study of a model he used for multiple works in Boston. Stood and sketched quickly. This time, I was happier.

Now it was 6pm and I was hungry. Thought I’d have dinner in the atrium. Walked through the doors and into music blasting at ear bleed levels – Mustang Sally, Lady Marmelade, 24K Magic. What the what? It was first Friday and a dance party for patrons, mostly middle-aged and older, was in full swing. Booty’s were primly shaking and uncoordinated white people awkwardly danced. I fled. I was going to take my chances on the mean streets when a docent assured me the museum’s upscale restaurant was out of earshot.

All righty. Seated by the elegant hostess who wore discreet black sequins, wide leg velvet cargo pants, and a marvelous slouch chapeau. I ordered the seared duck, only later aware of the irony of this choice in a museum that was featuring a retrospective of the illustrator of Make Way For Duckings. It was…chewy, but so is jerky and I was hungry.

No difficulty summoning an Uber. Back in the hotel, I watched the weather channel and fell asleep wondering whether a blizzard in Boston is anything like what Laura Ingalls Wilder described.

Woke to cottony skies and promises of a blizzard. Deciding that fortune favors the bold, I called Uber and set off. Streets were still clear, and by 10 am I was trotting up the swept and salted steps of the MFA.
I usually avoid large museums on the weekend when they’re the most crowded but today I had the MFA nearly all to myself. I began in the Asian rooms. My interest in all things oriental has broadened and deepened with the engagement of my son to Julia Liu, and I found myself paying close attention to the distinction between objects from China, Japan, Tibet and Laos. The calm and dignity of the Buddha, especially the bodhisattvas, has appealed to me since my hippie youth. I want mercy more than justice, Give me compassion, every time.
And there was this casually seated fellow with that glint of amusement in his expression. A moment seated before him calmed my mind.

This stone tomb gave me some ideas for another box.

If only my skill set allowed my production to keep up with my ideas. Alas, t’was ever thus, even my paintings.
I got lost looking for coffee and found myself in the ‘modern’ rooms. Okay, I appreciate the cleverness of this screen, even more so the play of shadows through the piercings. And this entrance door to the France Stark UH-OH exhibit attracts and repels.
Sure, it tickles me – pure, gleeful naughtiness- but it dismays me too, Is this what women have to do to have an exhibition in a museum and attract the attention of patrons?
Whatever.
I skipped breakfast and went the atrium for brunch. Ended up with a disappointingly stingy bowl of mussels that tasted weirdly astringent.  Like the old Woody Allen joke; “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.””
Snow was falling now. Not fat swirling flakes, but tiny particles, steady and dense, like confectioner’s sugar shaken from a sieve. Hypnotic to my southern eyes.
Afterwards I took another pass through the exhibition that lured me here, William Merritt Chase. The breadth of his collection of textiles and exotic props speaks to my own love of tactile elements. His paintings and pastels of his family life recall the painter Carl Larsen, a favorite of mine, and warms me up to him. I’m fascinated by his paintings of his studio. His position as an educator of painters, particularly female students, inclines me toward him. There’s an undercurrent of worry as I examine the parade of idyllic innocence and beauty – did he abuse the vulnerability of his students, his wife and her sisters, his daughters? My trust in surface respectability has been shaved down to near transparency. I’ll do a little Googling. It doesn’t count as stalking if he’s dead, right? And I want to know what became of the pretty girl he married and painted ever after.*
By 2:30 the snow was still relentlessly falling and the streets mimicked Childe Hassam’s famous work. Only bluer. With cars.

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Called Uber and behold a driver was dropping off passenger outside the door. Bam! My Somalian driver got me back to the hotel going five miles an hour, without incident. The sidewalk was like a bowl of slushy snow soup. Proof:

*Sad to say, there are details about his private life they fail to mention in the hagiographic audio tour. I did a bit of scouting on the internet for more biographical information. My source is not TMZ, it’s from an article published by the Smithsonian.

“During their courtship, Alice, by then 20, became pregnant, and she and Chase, who was 37, were married in February of 1887. Their first child, a girl, was born the next day. It was obvious that Chase had put off marrying his love until the last moment.”

“Gallati, the curator of the current Chase exhibition, believes that he was caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, a wife and child “conflicted with the public image of cosmopolitan sophistication that he was so industriously constructing for himself.” Yet, a refusal to marry the mother of his child would cause a scandal and harm “his reputation and therefore his prospects for professional success.” Alice, a beguiling beauty, would become his most important model.”

Chase was 37, Alice was 20. Well, that explains why his wife looks like a child in her portraits. She was barely adult.  How very Rubensesque of him.** He knew her family since she was 13. He married her the day before their first child was born. The day before. Let that sink in.  I searched for what became of her, that pretty girl he painted and knocked up so very often. Not much on the internet – she survived eight births, don’t know how many pregnancies. He summered in Europe. I need to find an unbiased biography. But, you know, it’s what’s missing from his work, that stream of domestic bliss and erotic beauty. The dark side, the struggle.  His desire for fame, his profligate spending, his struggle for money and social position, his fall from favor as patrons’ tastes changed, none of that is visible.

He died of cirrhosis of the liver at 66. She vanishes from the record.

**Hélène Fourment married Rubens when she was 16 years old and he was aged 53.

One of the perks of a room on the ninth floor: the view over the city at dawn was lovely.

Breakfast: sustaining oatmeal, doctored with cinnamon, maple syrup, raisins, and bananas, and more brutally bitter espresso. I need get to  The Wired Puppy or even Starbucks.
Summoned Uber,  and rolled back to the MFA. Not nearly done with it.
Started through the European painting rooms and right away was transfixed by a Greco portrait of a young monk, Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino. I started sketching his sensitive, expressive face…and there went the morning. I tried to keep moving forward – so many masterworks to see – but could not resist.

More happy than productive, I sketched the morning away. An excellent use of my time.

I didn’t capture what I was after, the marvelous ambiguity of an expression both tender and haughty, aesthetic and sensual, but I was rewarded with the opportunity to look closely for as long as I wanted to.

Moving along, I talked with a woman behind a little pushcart with implements of metal work; hammers, chasing tools, wooden dapping form, a pot of tar for repouseé. She was parked in front of a pyramid of silver pieces mounted on the wall and was explaining various silversmithing techniques. As we spoke, I realized that over the last year I’ve become familiar with that vocabulary. It’s one thing to have an intellectual grasp of the words,  it’s another to understand planishing* from muscle memory.
Somewhere at the crossroads of several rooms, I found this display of glass vases in rows. It was brilliantly lit and the perfect lure for a painter – all bouncing sheen and ricocheting shimmer. Oooh, shiny. Now this would be fun to paint. Famous last words.

Returned to the incomparable painting Automedon with the Horses of Achilles by Henri Regnault and soaked it in. It’s not so much I dislike all art made after 1800, aka ‘modern art’, it’s that it killed this – it made skill and technique and purpose and narrative unfashionable, obsolete and unwelcome. That’s what makes me cranky. But not a hater! That screen modeled on a grater is terrific fun, it’s just not this.

Saw a few things I made note of with my trusty iPhone camera:
Naughty Bread: For some reason, when artists paint bread they appear to have other things than yeast rising on their minds. Seriously, did Luis Meléndez think rendering this in dough would give him plausible deniability?Condiment holder: I inherited one of these, only nicer. It was passed down from my grandmother Irene Lake. Seeing something you cherish presented as a treasure in a museum is a thrill. Weathervanes: I’m planning to make one for the screen porch. A spaniel, of course. These will help get me going.St Luke Drawing the Virgin: Because he’s the painter’s patron saint, yo. And the curator on the audio guide speculated it was a self-portrait of the artist Rogier van der Weyden because of the care and detail with which the sketch beneath the head of the saint was done.
I ate lunch at the fancy restaurant, Bravo. It was pricey but decent.
I was about finished for the day and hastening past the impressionists when I saw this painting of a man toweling off after his bath.

Out came my pencil and the next thing I knew, the museum was closing. Ubered back and spent some time trying to find an easy way to upload photos (use the damn cable) and searching for information about Mrs. Chase.

On another, much cheerier subject, let us now praise modern technology. I’ve never had much luck with binoculars (they bump against my lenses) and magnifying glasses are not much use in museums when you are supposed to stay at least 12 inches away. But I can take a photo with my iPhone, enlarge it, and see details clearly. This was a small painting (perhaps 5-7”) at the Isabella Stewart Gardner in an obscure corner wall in dim light. I could barely make out the subject. I tapped my  Camera+ app, took a photo, cropped and enlarged it and OMG. There it was! Buried treasure, lifted into the light. Thank you, Steve Jobs.
And when you ask a kind passerby to take your photo and the backlight obliterates you? Filters are fun too.

*Planishing (from the Latin planus, “flat”) is a metalworking technique that involves finishing the surface by finely shaping and smoothing sheet metal.