What's All the Bunk About Turner?

Today for our adventure Ellie and I went downtown. We met Rob at Burrito Joe's, where we enjoyed a lovely lunch of nachos and burritos. Then poor Rob, the working stiff, went back to the office. Ellie and I walked two blocks to the Taft Museum of Art, one of the few old buildings left in downtown. The Taft is a lovely mansion built in 1820 and eventually belonged to Anna and Charles Taft. The Museum is my favorite kind: homes filled with the personal art collections of the owners. Much more enticing than walls and walls and endless rooms of paintings and artifacts hodge podged together. Apparently, in the early 1900s when Anna and Charles were acquiring their collection, the race was on among the American aristocracy to have the finest art collection. In fact, in 1909 none other than Isabella Stewart Gardner wrote, "We are rather amused by a newspaper account of the great collections in America. It eliminates Morgan's because so much of it is in Europe and goes on to say that the three great ones are Frick's, Widener's and Charles Taft's. No hope for me." A prize for the first Hinckley family member to visit all the aforementioned collections.

The real reason the Taft was on our list this month is that they have a special exhibit of Turner watercolors. Most are in the museum's permanent collection, but they are hosting Turner lectures and have put all the small watercolors in one tiny gallery. They were Turners I'd never seen before - mostly illustrations he did for various books. Very unlike his other work and rather delightful.

It was quite a lovely day. A beautiful crisp fall day. Ellie slept through the whole thing, but everyone at the museum oohed and ahhed over her. It was quite an operation to get us through the galleries. The staff has to notice that we are coming, then open the handicapped elevator so that we don't have to use the stairs, and then let us out on the other side. The museum was nearly empty, despite it being Free Wednesday, so I think every docent and security guard ended up helping us along the way. And each commented with delight that I was very smart to start her off early in museums. I didn't tell them that this was her second, that the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center beat them by a week. The museum staff waved us out the door and said to come back soon. We will.