Glass Flowers

 So long as I was at Harvard, I went to see the glass flowers at the university's Museum of Natural History.

I knew that Harvard had this collection but I had never visited.  The flowers are AMAZINGLY realistic, made from 1886 to almost 1930 by father and son Czech glassblowers, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.

While I was there, a faculty member (light blue shirt) explained the exhibits to guests.

Entranced by the models' beauty and accuracy, Boston residents Elizabeth C. Ware and her daughter Mary Lee Ware agreed to finance the creation of an entire collection.

I am a bit of a gardener, and I swear I would not be able to tell the difference between some of these glass models and the plants on which they were modeled.

Harvard

 I first visited the Harvard Yard a million years ago, when I was a junior in high school.  There was graffiti and trash everywhere.  Horns honked and motorcycles revved their engines loudly in nearby Harvard Square.  Students trudged past, alone and with unhappy blank looks.  I decided to go elsewhere.

Maybe because it is summer and the students aren't yet back, but the campus seems calmer and cleaner.

Widener Library has a few students sitting on the wide steps.

John Harvard looks stern, as always.

I always thought this huge building was a church.  It was called Memorial Hall then and is Annenberg Hall now.  The biggest use is a huge freshman dining hall.  Who would have guessed?

Langdell Hall is the law school's library, but visitors can't get inside.

Austin Hall houses many law school classes.  It is a handsome Richardsonian Romanesque building that masks the terror law students feel in the seminar halls as they fear being called upon.

Museum of Fine Arts

 I rarely visit Boston without visiting the Museum of Fine Arts.

Cyrus Dallin’s majestic 1912 sculpture, Appeal to the Great Spirit, stands at the museum's Huntington Avenue entrance.  I'm kind of tired of modern critics complaining about historic statues that don't embody the values the critics would want if the sculptures were crafted today.

Thomas Sully's Passage of the Delaware shows George Washington on horseback watching his soldiers cross the Delaware River before a surprise attack on Hessian troops at the Battle of Trenton.

I love John Singleton Copley's portrait of Paul Revere, the patriot and silversmith.

Kehinde Wiley's brightly colored portrait of a young Black man posed like a nobleman stands out in a gallery filled with sober classical 18th and 19th century portraits.

Louis Comfort Tiffany's brighter panel is in the center, with John Lafarge's darker stained glass panels on the sides.

The museum wisely places a comfortable bench opposite John Singleton's painting, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, so one can sit for a while and admire the work.  Two privileged daughters are in the front, while two other sisters stand quietly behind.  Beside the rear sisters and at the right of the painting are tall Japanese vases, which the Boit family later donated to the MFA.

The museum shows two Rembrandt portraits, but a panel indicates that some critics believe the painting of the man was done by an apprentice in the school of Rembrandt.

I saw Edgar Degas' Little Dancer at the MFA, as I did at the Clark Art Institute a few days earlier.

Boston Common and the Public Gardens

Augustus Saint-Gaudens' wonderful bas relief bronze sculpture of Robert Gould Shaw, a white officer from Boston, leading the 54th Regiment of Black volunteers in the Civil War, is at the northeast corner of Boston Common, facing the Massachusetts State House.

 Through their heroic, yet tragic, assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina on July 18, 1863, in which Shaw and many of his men died, the 54th helped erode Northern public opposition to the use of Black soldiers and inspired the enlistment of more than 180,000 Black soldiers into the United States forces.

A horseback George Washington greets visitors on the western edge of Boston Common.

A hawk thought Washington's tricorn was a good perch.

The Boston Foundation Monument is on the northern edge of Boston Common.  It is a 1930 sculpture by John Francis Paramino, set in granite.  It depicts William Blaxton (left) greeting John Winthrop (right) and others, including Ann Pollard, two Native Americans, and an allegorical female representing Boston.

The family in Make Way for Ducklings, a wonderful book by Robert McCloskey, is memorialized by a bronze sculpture by Nancy Schön, a park landmark since 1987.  Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack follow their mother at the northeast corner of the Public Gardens, along Charles Street.

Boston Public Library

 In 1887 the prestigious New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White was chosen to design Boston's new library. In 1888, Charles Follen McKim proposed a Renaissance style design based on the Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève in Paris. The trustees of the library approved, and construction commenced. 

The library is in Back Bay on Copley Square, the prominent corner of Boylston Street and Dartmouth Street, opposite Richardson's Trinity Church.  

Two allegorical statues by Bela Pratt were installed in 1912 and frame the entrance to the library, representing Science (above, holding a globe) and Art (holding a palette and brush).

Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Sculptor Domingo Mora carved the head of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, below the library’s motto: FREE TO ALL.

One of the most striking features of the main staircase is the pair of lions that memorialize two Massachusetts volunteer infantries in the Civil War. Surviving members of the regiments funded the sculptures by Louis Saint-Gaudens, who, under time pressure, delivered the marble figures before he could polish them. The lions remain unpolished at the request of the regiment survivors, who thought that the effect of the raw carved marble was ideal.

One of many busts in the Bates Reading Room is this bronze of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Artist John Singer Sargent spent 29 years of his career adorning this hall on the third floor of the McKim Building between 1890 and 1919.  Sargent's theme, Triumph of Religion, incorporates a broad range of moments and iconography from early Egyptian and Assyrian belief systems, Judaism, and Christianity.

Trinity Church, Boston

 

Trinity Church still stands out, even though Boston's Copley Square is being torn up for a future garden.

The church and parish house were designed by Henry Hobson Richardson.  Construction took place from 1872 to 1877. 

It stands beside I. M. Pei's 60-story, 790-foot glass building, originally known as the John Hancock Tower and now known as 200 Clarendon Street.

Richardson and the church's minister, Phillips Brooks, decided that a richly colored interior was essential and turned to John La Farge (1835–1910) for help.  LaFarge painted murals for the church and later designed stained glass windows for it.

Trinity's stained glass  collection is considered one of the finest in the country.

Chesterwood

 Daniel Chester French spent his summers painting and sculpting at Chesterwood, his Stockbridge home.

French worked in a nearby studio.

The studio has a beautiful view out into the Berkshires.

French's best known work is the seated bronze Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial at the end of the Mall in Washington, D. C.   This is a much smaller plaster version of that sculpture.