So today we went to the Museum of Fine Arts again. I had an auto-call late last week or early this week reminding me to renew our membership, which expires at the end of this month. The voice recording also informed me about the new exhibit of Audubon’s Birds that is up right now and I knew we had to made a date to go see that.
Birds. Art. Win!
The curators paired Audubon’s beautiful birds with his words, which was really wonderful. Who knew Audubon was such a lyrical writer, even though English was not his native language. i had so much fun reading his descriptions of watching the birds. My favorite was the description of stalking the spoonbill, creeping on hands and knees through the mud and sawgrass to watch them. He described how beautiful they were and then ended by shooting two of them. A different sensibility.
Of course we didn’t just look at the birds. We also took a walk through the musical instruments room.
(We are definitely going to buy the MFA’s Musical Instruments ebook, which you can preview here. It has video and audio clips of the instruments being played.)
We saw some American naval art. Model ships!
And Egyptian art, naturally. Bella had to go visit her old favorites.
We peeked at some Chinese lacquer ware and Japanese screens.
We saw an exhibit of photographs from a featured collection. A beautiful exhibit, everything but one was black and white.
We took a walk (run) in the courtyard during our lunch break.
We ended with Greek art.
And then our weary band headed home.
To quell the squabbling that always seems to break out in the back seat in the last twenty minutes before home, I read Chesterton’s Lepanto. I’d never read it all the way through before. What a great poem to declaim out loud. Even if I did have to compete with the squalling Lucy, who was most hungry and unhappy about her diaper.
I am drooling over those model ships!! What a gift for all of you that you are able to go here regularly 🙂
Say, Melanie? You know how on the iPad you can pinch and zoom the screen? I really need to be able to do that in order to read online (else I have to hold the Pad two inches from my eye), but here on your new blog I can’t do that — do you suppose it’s a settings issue on your end? (And might you be willing to undo it, of so, maybe?). Thanks for considering!
Ellie,
Oh yeah. The model ships were so very drool-worthy. We really are blessed to be able to go. And it was fun to occasionally see a guard smiling at the kids talking about the art.
I do not know about the pinch and zoom; but I’ll try to find out. What a pain. I hate to be unfriendly to your poor eyes. We’re still tweaking the design and format even as I type Dom is doing his stuff. I’m not a big fan of having to click through a “read more” link to get to the full blog posts either.
Ellie,
I’ve turned off the function to show a special version to phones and tablets. Hope that helps.
Oh blessings! I can pinch and zoom again, and so can read easily. Thank you so much!
Oh good. Glad it worked.
**whispers** yeah, I like being able to scroll down a page, seeing full posts. But it’s your blog! 🙂
On the iPad …. It’s part of the touch screen capability: place two fingers (thumb and first) on the screen together and slide them apart: and the screen zooms in, making everything nice and big. Anyhow, most anywhere I browse I can do it, but once in while there is a blog that prevents it somehow.
I would have loved to see that Audubon exhibit. Incredible!
[…] last week’s trip to the MFA when we discovered the musical instruments collection I remembered that the MFA had sent me an […]