Wherever I thought that I would be when I heard of the Queen's death, I don't think that I ever had Milwaukee Art Museum on my list of possibles. It was, therefore, a memorably surreal visit to what is, unquestionably, a superb museum - the building, the collection (I was looking primarily at C19th US art), and the curation - so much care going into the labels, and especially in making one see racialized history that would otherwise be invisible. And now I'm forty five miles further north, in a little house overlooking Lake Michigan (lake? it is a huge lake, with waves, and at its widest point 118 miles across ...), with the moon gilding the water, and this offers plenty of space for contemplating, and indeed grieving, a figure who was there for my entire life. It is - as I knew it would be - a huge, huge jolt to the scheme of things British.
So I'm likely to remember the museum ... but it's memorable in its own right.
I took so many photos of paintings - but I'll share just two details: a cat in a painting by Martin Drölling, The Music Lesson (1796) who seems really aggrieved that this bowl isn't full of something delicious, and a completely daft Fragonard sheep.
Milwaukee - with a downtown full of monumental buildings - seems a very art conscious town: here's a sculpture by Maren Hassinger, Pyramid, from this year - right next to the tall Northwestern Mutual building, it uses repurposed sticks from Fox Point.
And here, for good measure, is my view when I arrived in Oostburg this afternoon. Two days of workshop lie ahead ...
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