Last night was the Portland Art Museum’s Free Fourth Friday for July, where museum admission was free and it was only five dollars to see the special exhibition of The Art of the Louvre’s Tuileries Garden.
I showed up to the museum a bit early, as I often do when meeting people, because of the vagaries of bus schedules. I was meeting Shawna to head to the museum, she was doing volunteer work earlier in the day that ended at five and had to make her way across town.
The line at the front door was stretching around the block when we got in line, only to find out that the side entrance had no line at all. A lot of the people were there for a film, I am not sure what it was about, so after checking my backpack we get through the crowd up to the second floor and the exhibition halls pretty quickly.
Upstairs we handed our tickets over to the staffer at the entrance to the special exhibition, she checked the date on them and waved us into the hallway to see the exhibition. Spread across two floors, it is a mix of statues, paintings, photography, a large tapestry, and a small wooden model of Tuileries’ grounds and gardens.
We spent almost the entire two hours we had until the museums closing looking at the exhibit, with just a few minutes to glance over the other galleries. I took photos of the sculptures, but not of the paintings and photographs (daguerreotype and silver plates). In my mind, a photo of a sculpture is unique to the photographer, his own angle or perspective of it. Paintings or photos, in a photograph, either look the same as the original (which feels a bit like theft to me) or the photo is so poorly done that I wouldn’t want to share it anyways.
Below are my favorite bits from the exhibition:
