My mother made sure that on our trips around Europe, we visited every museum she’d ever heard of. She didn’t have the internet for google searches so she must have had some pretty good guidebooks. Truthfully, as a child, I would have preferred a vacation involving a beach or a swimming pool. As a child I went with them to the Prado in Madrid, the El Greco museum in Toledo, the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Museums, and of course the Louvre. And there were many cathedrals where my parents gave an impoverished guide a few lira or francs to take us through the church and explain the paintings. (All that traveling makes it sound like we were a wealthy family doing round the world tours. We weren’t. My father was a civilian with the U.S. Air Force, and we were stationed in Munich, Germany and later Chateauroux, France, both well positioned for travels on the cheap around Europe on his leaves.)
So the museum love stuck. I still want to visit any I can. Truthfully (again) I’m not as interested in history museums (I know, I know…I’m married to an historian) though I’m open to it. Art is the thing I want to see. We’re planning our summer near Boston and I’m doing my research. I’ve previously been to the Isabella Stewart Gardner (great, particularly it’s outside garden), and the Museum of Fine Arts both in Boston, but I’ll gladly go again. I found out that there’s a “Museum of Bad Art” there whose catch phrase is “art too bad to be ignored.” I won’t ignore that one. Perhaps what turned me towards art like that is visiting “The Collection de L’Art Brut” in Lausanne, Switzerland where most of the artists are self-taught or those on the fringe of society, such as artists living in mental hospitals. I didn’t know I liked Contemporary art until then, but that made me want to visit the Broad in Los Angeles with its many Basquiats. Another plus, it’s free!
I enjoyed The Foundling Museum and the Transportation Museum in London, The British Museum, The National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, The Tate and the Tate Modern, and the National Maritime Museum, the eclectic Horniman Museum and gardens, and I love museums that deal with aspects of medicine. My life won’t be complete until I can visit the Hunterian Museum in London. It’s devoted to John Hunter, a pioneer of modern medicine. There’s a wonderful book by Wendy Moore, “The Knife Man”, that was based on his work. Every time I’ve been in London it’s been closed for a major redevelopment but it’s open now and worthy, I expect, of another trip to London. I did go to the Old Operating Theater museum. And a medicine museum in Edinburgh—I’m not sure which one, they have so many. I’ve enjoyed wonderful museums of all sorts around the United States as well as those in Europe.
I also seek out photography museums and exhibits. Should I include the Botanical gardens that I dearly love? Why not? After all, some artistic souls designed, planted, and tend to these magnificent, orderly tributes to nature. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is my favorite, but the Royal Botanic in Edinburgh and the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden, with their creativity and variety follow closely behind.
I had intended to write about my favorite artists, but I got distracted by museums—and I’ve run out of paper.