Day Thirteen: Danbury, CT - Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA

200 miles, 3 hours


Um, no real reason to post this, except that it marks the last day of our trip. We are still enjoying each others company, and Wendy has only asked for a music-change just a few times. It is good to get home for Ellie's birthday, which is today!

Saturday, May 3, 2014

here is today's playlist:

Neil Young - Comes A Time


Carly Simon - Come Upstairs


Frank Sinatra - Come Swing With Me!


Clueless soundtrack (Counting Crows do acoustic Ghost In You)


Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Déjà Vu


Bananarama - Deep Sea Skiving

Day Twelve: Cherry Hill, NJ - Zimmerli Art Museum - Newark Museum - Montclair Art Museum - Hudson River Museum - Newington-Cropsey Foundation - Danbury, CT

200 miles, 8 1/2 hours, 5 museums!


Up for our last day of museums - hit the road a little after 9 - up to Rutgers' Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick. The two best pieces there are:

Albert Bierstadt, Glen Ellis Falls, 1869


John Kensett, View of the Shrewsbury River, New Jersey, 1859


There was also a nice space for Dale Chihuly's "Rivera Blue Macchia Chartreuse Lip Wrap".


I had previously seen his works at the Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, CO


and at the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas


and at The Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio


Then off from the Zimmerli to The Newark Museum. We were early (opens at noon), so we looked at the garden area in front of the museum. Imagine my surprise to see a poster/presentation titled "The Polhemus Family":


My Dad's name was Theodore Polhemus Dixon, Jr., so I can only imagine what sort of Baltimore connection my (Dixon) family had, long before my Dad married Eugenia Whyte Carton from Baltimore.

The first thing I saw was another piece by Dale Chihuly (Permanent Blue Macchia with Cadmium Orange Lip Wrap, 1986)


My database has 15 artists at The Newark Museum, and we did see lovely pieces by Bierstadt and Bradford; Church, Cole, and Cropsey; Duncanson and Durand; Heade, Homer, and Huntington. My favorite was Thomas Moran, Sunset, Venice, 1902

I was very happy because I don't think that I had seen any of Moran's later paintings on this trip - they seem to combine Turner's dramatic skies with some type of American color palette (orange/greens/blues).

From The Newark Museum, it was a quick trip to the Montclair Art Museum. My two favorites were:
Thomas Moran, Scene on the Snake River, ca. 1879


and Martin Johnson Heade, Gathering Hay in the Salt Marshes, ca. 1876-82


Then one hour up to the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York. Not very many pieces, but I am happy to have been able to visit it.


The nicest painting is one loaned (since 1971) from the Hastings-on-Hudson Union Free School District: Jasper Cropsey, View at Hastings-on-Hudson, Circa 1895-1897:


Being in a "Jasper Cropsey" frame of mind, we drove 3 miles up the Hudson River to the Newington-Cropsey Foundation in Hastings-on-Hudson.




This is a beautiful exhibition area, and Cropsey's home and studio, and, unfortunately, no photographs were allowed inside. There is a white ballroom on the second floor, an exquisite space painted white, with a lot of natural light, and Cropsey paintings (both from Private Collections as well as belonging to the Foundation) along all the wals. An exquisite way to end a beautiful trip (well, we still have an hour tonight, and three hours tomorrow before we are home).

Friday, May 2
Holiday Inn, Cherry Hill, NJ
1 hour -- Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ
3/4 hour -- The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
1/4 hour -- Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ
1 hour -- Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY
1/4 hour -- Newington-Cropsey Foundation, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
1 hour -- Holiday Inn, Danvers, CT

here is today's playlist:

Thompson Square - Just Feels Good


Bruce Cockburn - Big Circumstance


John Cougar Mellencamp - Big Daddy


Joe Jackson - Big World


Dave Matthews Band - Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King

Day Eleven: Arlington, VA - Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD - Baltimore Museum of Art - Biggs Museum of American Art, Dover, DE - Cherry Hill, NJ

220 miles today



Well, we left Arlington, VA at 9 AM. We were on the southwest side of DC, and we were heading northeast. Google Maps sent us on "the most direct route", which took us along the south part of Washington, but I made a wrong turn and headed into street traffic and stop-signs east of the Capitol - not a good drive! Everything "turned out ok" and we made it up to Baltimore (which is a bit of a driver's headache on its own). Eventual street parking, and we got to see some gems at the Walters Art Museum:

Highlights of the Walters are paintings by Duncanson, Church, Alfred Jacob Miller (a Baltimore son), JMW Turner, Durand, Degas, Monet (2), Haseltine (pencil and ink on paper), Bierstadt (behind glass, unfortunately) and William Trost Richards (also behind glass). They have a very large collection of Millers, but only one was on display.

The Frederic Church (Morning in the Tropics, ca. 1858) is a lovely little painting:


but one of the benefits of going on these trips is discovering new artists and new art. The Walters has two such pieces:
Clearing Up - Coast of Sicily, 1847, by Andreas Achenbach (German, 1815-1910)


Syria, The Night Watch, 1880, by Briton Riviere, R.A. (British, 1840-1920)


From the Walters, it was just 2 1/2 miles north to get to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Although the majority of the Museum was closed for renovations (reopening Fall 2014), it was worth a gamble to see what was on display, and to have a divine lunch. For me, the two beauties of the collection were the Monets side-by-side:


Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effects with Smoke, 1903, is on the left, and Charing Cross Bridge, Reflections on the Thames, 1899-1904, is on the right

Auguste Robin produced such powerful sculpture, and it was wonderful to see The Thinker (original model 1880; this cast 1904-1917, Bronze)


Time for a lovely lunch in their cafe/restaurant


and then viewing their Henry Moore and Alexander Calder pieces in their Sculpture Garden in the beautiful sunshine.
Calder, 100 Yard Dash, 1969


Then over-the-river-and-through-the-woods (well, actually it was over-the-Bay-and-through-the fields) to the Biggs Museum of American Art, Dover, DE. I only had 2 pieces in my database (a Bierstadt, and a Cole), so imagine my surprise and pleasure to discover additional pieces by Asher B. Durand, Edmund Darch Lewis, William Trost Richards, Worthington Whittredge, plus another Cole!! My two favorites here are:

Albert Bierstadt, Niagara Falls, c 1869


William Louis Sonntag (1822-1900), The Misty Rocky Mountains, late 1860s


Although the map at the top of this blog shows the next stop at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington, DE (they have a Frederic Edwin Church [South American Landscape, 1873] and an Asher B. Durand [Classical Landscape, c. 1850]), they close at 4 PM, which was just too early for us to make on this trip. So off we went for two hours to spend the night at the Holiday Inn in Cherry Hill, NJ (after a wonderful dinner-and-desert at The Cheesecake Factory!).

Thursday, May 1
Arlington Court Suites, Arlington, VA
1 hour -- Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD
1/4 hour -- Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
2 hours -- Biggs Museum of American Art, Dover, DE
2 hours -- Holiday Inn, Cherry Hill, NJ

here is today's playlist:

Deede's assorted 2013 music

Coldplay - Live 2003


Coldplay - Mylo Xyloto


Jackson Browne - The Naked Ride Home


The Big Chill soundtrack