Dennis Dixon is heading West!: Florida - Day One (Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA - Logan Airport - Springfield, MA

Back on the road again! I drove Wendy to the airport to fly to visit a friend in Florida, and I will be driving 1,800 miles down the road to join her Saturday afternoon:

I anticipate seeing 16 museums on the way down, starting with the Michele and Donald D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Mass. (along with its sister/next-door museum - the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum).

Visiting these two museums in Springfield only added five miles to my trip today! This is exactly how I like to organize my trips - if "something special" is not currently on display, I (hopefully) have not gone very far out-of-my-way, so no big deal.

But the D'Amour did have "something special" - a pair of very small paintings by Canaletto (1697-1768). He was an Italian painter (real name Giovanni Antonio Canal, but he named himself Canaletto)[it gets confusing because his nephew and pupil Bernardo Bellotto also called himself Canaletto, and also did some beautiful landscapes/Venice scenes). Whenever I refer to Canaletto, I mean Antonio Canal - I will refer to Bellotto by name. The small pair by Canaletto are

Capriccio: Farmhouse on the Venetian Mainland, 1755-1765

Capriccio: Villa and Ruins by a River, 1755-1765

a larger painting by Canaletto's nephew Bernardo Bellotto:
Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, 1740-1741

three paintings that stood out were
Albert Bierstadt (The Hetch Hetchy Valley, California)

Claude Monet (Grainstack, 1893)

Worthington Whittredge (The Lonely Graves, about 1866)

also in the D'Amour were paintings by
William Bradford
Alfred Thomas Bricher
John W. Casilear
Frederic Edwin Church
Sanford Robinson Gifford (2)
Winslow Homer (2)
John Kensett

In the courtyard is the Dr. Seuss sculpture garden (photo taken in Feb 2014) - what fun!

And across the courtyard is the George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum. Their American Paintings Salon is a large room on the second floor, with the paintings displayed in the "Salon" fashion - too bad, but necessary if you have more art than wall space

The museum now has a very nice brochure that allows you to identify what you are looking at:

and the highlight here is Albert Bierstadt's Sunrise in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, California, 1873-1875

Shut down the museum at 5 PM, hit the road (91 South), and pulled into the Super 8 in Allentown, PA at 9 PM (360 miles). Thank you God for a great day!

Music today (I listened to albums):

Jack Johnson - In Between Dreams (2005)