The International Test Rose Garden

Posted on September 30, 2024 by admin

I was expecting to see roses at the International Test Rose Garden in Washington Park in Portland. I wasn’t expecting a bronze Royal Rosarian.

Mainly because I’d never heard of the Royal Rosarians. Reading a bit about them – including on a plaque near the statue – I found that they’re one of those local civic organizations composed of prominent businessmen who dress up for events. Something like the Texas Cavaliers in San Antonio, whose head cheese King Antonio passed out aluminum tokens each year to schoolchildren once upon a time, including me.

“The Royal Rosarians are the official greeters and goodwill Ambassadors for the City of Portland promoting the best interests of the City of Portland and the Portland Rose Festival,” the org’s web site says.

“Royal Rosarians welcome visiting dignitaries from around the world, host hundreds of out-of-town visitors, march in parades throughout the region, and perform ceremonial rose plantings in honor of worthy individuals both in Portland and during Rosarian ambassadorial trips to distant cities throughout the world. Organized in 1912, the Royal Rosarians are a non-profit, civic organization.”

In hilly Washington Park, which occupies more than 450 acres, the seven-acre International Test Rose Garden is directly downhill from the Portland Japanese Garden and, unlike that garden, free to visit. Some 10,000+ rose bushes grow there, representing 650+ varieties. If I hadn’t visited the Tyler Rose Garden earlier this year, I would have been flabbergasted by the profusion. Still, the garden is impressive.

The fact that it is a test garden means that rose growers far and wide send their cultivars for evaluation.

“Test beds are planted with new varieties evaluated on several characteristics, including disease resistance, bloom form, color and fragrance,” says the Spokesman-Review. “ A Gold Medal Garden features previous years’ best selections, and the Shakespeare Garden features roses named after characters in the bard’s works.”

The idea of a test garden in Portland goes back to World War I, when it was seen as a way to preserve cultivars that might otherwise be lost because of the fighting. Portland was already known for its roses by the early 20th century, as illustrated in this article in Oregon Live.

The thing to do at the International Test Garden is wander around, taking in the varieties.

Or –

Create rose-themed art.

Portland Japanese Garden

Posted on September 29, 2024 by admin

The other day I found a web site that promised to provide captions for photos. A very specific set of photos. It said:

Looking for the perfect captions for your photos of Japanese gardens? A well-crafted caption can help increase engagement on your Instagram posts and capture the serene beauty of these stunning landscapes.

We understand that coming up with the right words can be challenging, but don’t worry! We’ve got you covered with a wide variety of caption templates for Japanese garden photos.

Looks like what they’re selling is an AI service that will spit out captions for your pictures. Any kind of pictures. Japanese gardens is just one example. The site had a few captions for Instagram posted images on hand, pre-written, you might say. Such as:

Serenity in every step.

Restoring my inner balance amidst the lush greens.

In awe of the perfect blend of nature and art.

Awfully high-minded sentiments there. I enjoyed our visit to Portland Japanese Garden a lot, Yuriko even more, praising its authentic details and feeling.

But serenity in every step overstates things, and not just because I’d been warned about the possibility of wanker criminals smashing one of my car windows on the Washington Park road where we parked it, a problem we did not need 2,000 miles from home.

In the end, nothing happened, and I managed to keep the idea at the back of my mind most of the time during the visit, so I had serenity in a few steps. Every step is to expect too much, even in a perfectly carefree mood. Curiosity was in other steps, and also admiration, wonder, and oops, don’t want to trip. An entirely normal mix of feelings during a visit to a place with a such special resonance.

Water features.

Paths to follow. Or not. But we did.

Walled in are kare-sansui, and I won’t pretend I didn’t have to look that up. A Zen garden, in other words. Two of them, actually. One called the Sand and Stone Garden.

The other, larger, is adjacent to the Pavilion Gallery. The Flat Garden, it’s called.

I don’t know about restoring my “inner” balance. As I get older, I’m glad to still have the regular old sense of balance. As for the “perfect balance of nature and art,” that’s an advertising-quality meaningless statement. Bravo, AI.

The Washington State Capitol

Posted on September 26, 2024 by admin

My travels in ’85 took me through Olympia, Washington, for a visit to the Washington state capitol. Thinking back on that, the visit is mostly a blank.

Nearly 40 years will do that. But I remember a lot of other things about that trip. Driving on small rural roads through unfamiliar kinds of woods, dodging log trucks, I admired the brilliant gold Scotch broom in bloom in profusion on the roadside without knowing it is an invasive species in North America. Along a not-difficult hike under the tallest trees I’d ever seen, I remember that the trail passed by a van-sized fallen tree trunk marked by graffiti reporting itself to be from the 1930s. I remember that Butchart Gardens, gem of parks and light show in Victoria, BC, wowed me completely; so did Victoria and the drive to Duncan, BC where I bought lunch in a diner that immediately reminded me of a favorite diner in Nashville, and acquired a dictionary in a nearby bookshop that promised to be authoritative in Canadian English. Know what else British Columbia had? Really good Hungarian food. I remember visiting the Space Needle on my 24th birthday, watching David Letterman destroy watermelons on late-night TV while staying with my Seattle friends, listening to Laurie Anderson talk-sing on the radio (from United States Live) as we took a ferry to Bainbridge Island, our car the last one shoed into that particular vessel. While on the island we discussed the uses of Slug Death – a product that I’d never heard of, and was glad of it. I heard about geoducks for the first time as my companions tried to dig one up on the beach, fruitlessly.

It so happened that the first two nights on the return from Seattle would be in Portland. It also happens that Olympia, Washington, is pretty much on the way to Portland, just a stop on I-5. Stop we did, arriving late in the morning of the last day of August.

The crowning dome is the tallest self-supporting masonry dome in the United States, and among the tallest in the world, up there with the likes of the famed high points of St. Peter’s Basilica and St. Paul’s Cathedral.

A protest was going on in front, an assemblage waving Cambodian flags and signs in Khmer script. The speech must have been in Khmer. Of course that’s unintelligible to the likes of me, but no language skills were necessary to hear the stridency in his voice. Protesting the current authoritarian government in their country would be my guess.

Forty-two steps to the entrance, Washington being the 42nd state to join the union, in 1889. One of the Benjamin Harrison states. He signed bills for six, more than any other president.

The capitol took a while to build, delayed by the Panic of 1893, a fit of austerity on the part of the executive branch, and other disputes about this and that for a few decades. The domed structure wasn’t finished until 1927, a little late for that style. If the delay had been longer, Washington might have gotten something like Nebraska’s capitol.

Inside.

The chandelier under the dome is by Tiffany & Co. The largest thing that studio ever made, I’ve read, and the last job Louis Tiffany oversaw himself. With 200+ bulbs, it’s a massive thing, dangling up there, full of potential energy at a weight of five tons.

Tiffany also did the Roman fire pots, something I don’t believe I’ve seen in any other capitol, despite how well they evoke republican government. There are four all together, one each at the four corners of the room, and each surrounded by flags from Washington counties. Never actually used to hold fire these safety-conscious (-paranoid?) days.

On the floor, straight below the dome. Roped off from feet that would casually tread on President Washington.

The House chamber.

Him again. Who do they think he was, the Father of Our Country?

The 2001 Nisqually earthquake moved the Washington state capitol dome by three inches or so. Since then anchors besides gravity have been retro-engineering into the dome. The quake also left cracks on the floor stone. A capitol might convey permanence to the human mind, but impermanence has already gained a foothold.

A capitol isn’t built of stone and bronze alone. The Olmsted brothers, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, did the landscaping of the capitol grounds, with earth and vegetation as their raw materials. Anything by father or sons is usually worth a stroll through, especially on a warm summer day with blooms all around.

I knew at once it was a monument to those from Washington who died in the Great War

Sure enough. “Winged Victory,” by Alonzo Victor Lewis (d. 1946), known in the Pacific Northwest for his works.

One more feature of the capitol grounds: a view. Capitol Lake, created by the damming of the Deschutes River in 1951.

One of these days – as a larger movement to de-dam U.S. waterways is under way – the dam might be removed, returning to the estuary it once was. Naturally, there are arguments against taking the dam down. As much as I admired the behemoth likes of Bonneville and Grand Coulee, I could also be persuaded that a lot of the smaller dams were built simply because that’s what you did, and whatever economic justification they once had is long gone.

Spring Valley Summer ’24

Posted on July 23, 2024 by admin

A new garden has been installed at Spring Valley, which we visited over the weekend, during a run of flawless summer days. We’ve been in every season.

It’s a lush garden.

Even better, we were all able to get out to take a look.

The black-eyed Susans have emerged.

As well as – sunflowers?

We weren’t sure, but they do have a tall presence and yellow expansiveness, like sunflowers.

Museu Calouste Gulbenkian

Posted on June 5, 2024 by admin

On the day after much climbing around the Sintra hills, that is, Friday, May 17, the idea of visiting the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum and the surrounding Calouste Gulbenkian Garden had a lot going for it. A reportedly great collection of art, for one thing, in a vivid green park. Just as important, it was walking distance from our hotel. A fairly short walking distance, with the interlude of a leisurely brunch on the way. Our last full day in Portugal was going to be leisurely.

The brunch. Mine anyway.

There are pancakes, as you might find in North America, but under the meat and eggs, a position that’s less common over here. Good pancakes too. Considering the cost of living in Portugal and the relatively strong dollar vs. the euro, we enjoyed high-quality breakfast food at IHOP prices.

Much has been written about the oilman Calouste Gulbenkian (d. 1955) elsewhere, for feats of industrialism and a colossal amount of philanthropy. Then there was the matter of collecting art, which he did with both hands.

Apparently he liked Lisbon a great deal, and who wouldn’t, especially after Paris got too hot in 1940. Much earlier, he and his family escaped Ottoman persecution, so while you can’t call such a wealthy fellow a refuge, he did feel the need to flee occasionally, along the way evolving into a shadowy British-Armenian billionaire with a massive art collection. These days, his artwork is in the museum named for him in Lisbon, developed by his posthumous foundation.

“When it comes to sheer diversity enhanced by the highest of standards, then the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon is in a category of its own,” the NYT reported in 1984. “Its collections range from art of the ancient Greeks to the Impressionists, from Iznik faience to Jacob armchairs made for Marie Antoinette, with a goodly complement of carpets, coins, tapestries, ivories and illuminated manuscripts thrown in…

“Unlike most other museums (the Frick is a significant exception), the physical plant has been designed to fit the collection, rather than the other way around. There are vast halls for carpets, and small rooms for silver, vitrines designed so that objects can be seen from every side, and all in such a way that nothing ever looks crowded. The light, too, is unusually good.”

The description is still accurate. The variety doesn’t hit you until you’re past a half-dozen galleries, but then it hits all at once. The aesthetic appetite of this oilman emulator of Le goût Rothschild spanned centuries and continents, and he had the means to act on it.

Among other things, I spent quality time with his ancient coin collection. Gulbenkian had examples from all around the Greek world in the first few centuries after the invention of coinage in Lydia. He had some from Lydia itself; some of the first coins ever.

A good number of Near Eastern carpets were on display, some near the floor lying flat and lightly roped off. To my eye, flawless works. They gave me the opportunity to pass along the idea (to Ann) that certain carpet markers of yore, perhaps Persians, deliberately included a small imperfection in their work because only God is perfect. Something I heard years ago, I don’t know where, and I can’t vouch for its accuracy, caveats that I also passed along. I’m not the only one to wonder.

The Gulbenkian Foundation complex, including the museum, didn’t open until until more than a decade after his death, and pretty much screams 1969.

The garden, lush in an Iberian May, takes some of the edge off the brutalism.

We visited the museum first, then strolled the garden afterward.

The museum includes an indoor-outdoor cafe, where we stopped for pastries late in mid-afternoon, sitting outside.

Note the birds. They were not afraid of people.

Not at all.

Sintra: Parque de Pena

Posted on June 2, 2024 by admin

Forty minutes west by train from the sweeping 19th-century Rossio Railway Station, formerly Lisbon’s main train station, is the municipality of Sintra, which is at the end of one of the lines from Rossio. The cost to get there is modest, €2.30 each way, plus €0.50 one-time for a magnetic card, and the trains come often, since it counts as a commuter line.

Like any modern city, Lisbon sprawls out from its center, including in the direction of Sintra, and people used a number of the intermediate stops. But maybe nine out of ten riders on the mostly full train to Sintra were tourists going to the end of the line. Or at least that happened mid-morning on May 16, a Thursday, when we joined them.

Besides suburban-ish districts – which in a Euro-context means apartment blocks and small shops close to stations – we passed an inordinate amount of graffiti on the way. Every manmade surface you could see from the train window seemed to be covered with it – concrete walls, signs, small towers and other fixtures. Mostly tedious signature-style graffiti, not depictions of any kind, though if you spend enough time in greater Lisbon, you can find enough of that. Either a few Portuguese graffiti makers have a lot of time on their hands, or many young (I assume) Portuguese try their hand at it. Or, for all I know, Portugal attracts taggers from around the EU.

As a settlement, Sintra isn’t a function of modern sprawl. People have been in the Sintra hills since Paleolithic times. More recently (on a scale that includes the Paleolithic), members of the Portuguese upper class, whatever the form they’ve taken over the centuries, made the place their own. That includes, most importantly for the purposes of attracting travelers, Portuguese royalty. The kings are gone, but their visible legacy lives on in the form of palaces and other structures, which packs ’em in, in our time.

One in particular is an enormous draw: Pena Palace.

“Around 1840, Ferdinand II turned a ruined monastery into a castle in which Gothic, Egyptian, Moorish and Renaissance elements were displayed,” UNESCO gushes just a bit about the palace, since the district is another of Portugal’s World Heritage Sites.

“He surrounded the palace with a vast Romantic park, unparalleled elsewhere planted with rare and exotic trees, decorated with fountains, watercourses and series of ponds, cottages, chapels and mock ruins, and traversed by magical paths. He also restored the forests of the Serra, where thousands of trees were planted to supplement the oaks and umbrella pines which made a perfect contribution to the romantic character of the Cultural Landscape of Sintra.”

Pena Palace is quite the sight, even from below.

We got to that view via a municipal bus that circles the hills, stopping at the train station and then a number of sights, and which comes every few minutes; and then a small bus belonging to the palace for a few euro more, to climb up the steep hill toward the palace. There were lines for each of these modes, but not a lot of waiting, so efficient is modern Sintra at shuffling around tourists.

One thing we’d been warned to do – I had been warned, via online guide sights – was reserve a time for the palace. I made no attempt to do so until the evening before, when the only tours available online were the last ones of the day. We weren’t sure we’d still be in Sintra then, so we didn’t book for then. A tramp around the grounds and a look at some of the other sights ought to be enough, we figured. But we did ask at the palace ticket counter around 11 if anything was available that day. Yes, 2:30, she said.

So we got to see the palace. But not before we had time to visit the garden – forest – Romantic greenery around the palace. The Parque de Pena. Which meant going down, since the palace is on a hilltop. Down lush hillsides.

But not always down.

Note the handful of people. This was in great contrast to the crowds waiting to get into the palace. Later, we also waited to get into the palace, so I don’t begrudge their massing at that place. Just pointing out that not far away, the crowds are gone.

Signs pointed to a number of features and how many meters you had to walk to reach them. We picked the High Cross. That name might have been a hint of the climbing that was to come. Admiring natural beauty might be a precept of the Romantic movement, but none of the Romantic poets (that I know of) dwelled much on how accessing said beauty might involve a tiring walk. Unless the original title was “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, and Boy Am I Tired.”

The climb was entirely worth it, I have to add. Eventually the path narrows and you reach the cross.

Later, when we had a view from the palace, we saw that the cross is at the highest point in these hills. As such it offers good views, though partly obscured by foliage and that day by haze.

Looking back at Lisbon.

The Atlantic Ocean’s out that way, I think.

Returning meant going down hill from the cross but eventually uphill again, to reach the palace. The visitor center cafeteria was open, and we had time to eat and especially drink before our mid-afternoon tour. It was a satisfying repast. We had no bad meals in Portugal, not even at a tourist cafeteria.

It was cool and cloudy the day we visited Sintra, but climbing the hills was still thirsty work.

Jardim Botânico de Lisboa

Posted on May 23, 2024 by admin

On the map, the Lisbon Metro station Avenida looks fairly close to the Jardim Botânico de Lisboa. It is, but it turns out to be close to the walled-off backside of the garden. Some serious uphill walking is between you and the Lisbon Botanic Garden’s public entrance, via a twist of small streets and a sizable public staircase.

Not a bad thing, necessarily. We got an up close look at the neighborhood: the tilework, apartments and small shops (including one selling tile to builders), and some of the enormous amount of graffiti that Lisbon sports.

We passed by a few of the many construction projects in the Portuguese capital. Development goes on, despite a recent drop in residential sales in response to higher interest rates, because Lisbon residential properties fetch more than twice what they did 10 years ago, according to Cushman & Wakefield data.

The faux façade draping over this site was amusing. That’s what it will look like, we promise!

A larger development, also apartments.

A redevelopment — tear down — opportunity along the way.

The view from atop one of the public staircases along the way, which is a pedestrian continuation of the street below.

So some effort was expended to get to the garden, but it turned out to be worth it.

That’s how to get off the beaten path. Just a little lateral movement from that path.

Not a lot of the masses of overseas visitors to the city seemed to be at the Lisbon Botanic Garden. The place wasn’t empty, but you could enjoy pleasant walks through the lush springtime greenery without much in the way of crowding. For some reason, we heard more German at the garden than anywhere except Sintra later in the week, where one can hear many European and non-European languages.

It won’t be much of a botanic garden without lots of plants to examine.

Artwork is nestled among the greenery. Or sometimes on the bare patches or in the fallen timbers.

A favorite: ants overrunning a picnic. Really big ones. If ants were actually that big in Portugal, the country might not be such a tourist destination.

“Ants Picnic” by Tara E. Bongard, an Anglo-Portuguese artist.

Toward the end of our visit, I noticed this.

Araucaria Heterophylla: The mighty Norfolk Island pine.

Funny-looking tree, straight up like a pole with ridges. Not true pines, as it happens, and not native outside the South Pacific.

I don’t remember when I heard about them, but hear about them I did, years ago, maybe in one of the histories of Australia that I read. I didn’t think I’d seen one before with my own eyes. There it was. There they were, since the gardens include more than one. Everything else was very nice, but that really made my visit. (Just my visit, no one else was impressed.)

Tyler Rose Garden

Posted on April 24, 2024 by admin

The cliché is to stop and smell the roses, lest you pass your life in drab unappreciation of the delights easily available to you during your short lifespan. It expresses a worthwhile sentiment, almost always meant metaphorically.

At Tyler Rose Garden in Tyler, Texas, smelling the roses is literal. It’s the largest rose garden I’ve ever seen — and according to some sources, the largest such garden in the United States — with some 38,000 bushes representing 600 cultivars on 14 acres.

We arrived late in the warm morning of April 13, the day we left Dallas, on our way to visit an old friend of mine in Nacogdoches, Texas, as well as to (partly) rectify how little time I’ve spent in East Texas, a serious lacuna in my travels. Tyler is just south of I-20 east of Dallas, but not quite on that highway. We headed south on U.S. 69 from I-20 to get there.

Why a rose garden? Turns out Smith County, of which Tyler is the seat, was once the hub of U.S. rose production.

“Large-scale commercial production started in the early 1900s, and in 1917 the first train carload was shipped,” the always informative Texas State Historical Association says. “Droughts, freezes, and disease had destroyed the area’s peach orchards, so the nurserymen were forced to turn to something else. The climate and sandy loams of Smith, Van Zandt, Gregg, Cherokee, Harrison, and Upshur counties proved excellent for this type of horticulture, and large-scale commercial rose growing centered there.”

By the end of the 20th century, domestic and foreign competition had eaten into Texas’ market share for roses, but they are still grown in the area.

The day we came to Tyler was warm and clear, just right for a stroll among the roses of a free municipal garden.

And take time to look closely at – and of course – smell the roses. Watch out for bees, though.

It isn’t all roses.

“Let’s spell out Tyler in big metal letters, but leave out the Y.”

“Why?”

“Right, Y.”

But why?”

“Yes, Y.”

“Huh?”

And so on. A clever idea, whoever thought it.

Rotary Botanical Gardens, Janesville

Posted on July 27, 2023 by admin

Time for another summer break. Good to take those when you can. Back to posting around August 6. Or maybe the 7th. Not good to structure summer too much.

Didn’t get around to seeing either Oppenheimer or Barbie lately, though I’m much more likely to watch the former in a theater. I actually read The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987) back when it was fairly new, and before that (’83) took an undergraduate seminar on the Manhattan Project, which involved much interesting reading, of course, and watching an excellent documentary, The Day After Trinity (1981), all of which inspired awe and dread.

As for Barbie dolls, I share the indifference that most men feel – though I suppose if there are men who like My Little Pony, there must be secret Barbie admirers as well, and not just out of solidarity with Ken. Ann, on the other hand, has a sentimental attachment to the dolls, even nostalgic feelings, whatever that can mean at 20. So she went on the movie’s opening night, helping it set its high box office. She reported enjoying it.

I did get around, yesterday, to finishing The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Well worth watching, though uneven to the end. The arc of Midge and Susie and Joel formed the core sympathetic heart of the show, to good effect. The older characters – Abe and Rose and Moishe and Shirley – pretty much went off the rails in the later seasons, which was too bad. Old people are just a hoot, eh?

Still, Abe did have a few touching moments toward the end of the last season, especially at dinner in the company of other old men, with mortality as the unnamed character at the table. My favorite minor character was Lenny Bruce, and his appearance in the last episode was a heart breaker, with addiction the unnamed character joining him. The drug that killed the real Mr. Bruce in 1966 was reportedly morphine, which strikes me as a little old-fashioned for the 1960s, but the comedian always did things differently.

Last Sunday I stopped at the Kansasville Wisconsin Veterans Memorial Wayside Park again for a quick look at the adjacent cornfield.

Much higher than a month ago. It’s a little hard to tell from the Drought Monitor, but I think that part of Wisconsin is on the border of moderate and severe drought. The corn looks healthy enough to this non-farmer, however. Northern Illinois/southern Wisconsin’s gotten some rain lately, including a storm that blew through yesterday around noon.

The last place we went in Janesville early this month was the Rotary Botanical Gardens. Saw it on an electronic map, looked it up, decided to go. That’s the way to find places in our time.

We were well rewarded for the effort. How often do you see golden Hakone grass (Hakonechloa macra) pushing through a pile of small boulders?

That flow of grass was part of one of the Rotary Botanical Gardens’ centerpieces, its Japanese garden. Good to find those in the heart of North America.

Complete with the styles of bridges that tend to be in Japanese gardens, across a large pond.

I don’t believe for a minute that evil spirits are too cowardly or disoriented to cross a crooked bridge; or rather, I don’t believe that belief is the origin of the design. I believe it is aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics.

The Rotary is a large place. Besides the Japanese Garden, it includes (among other sections) an English Cottage Garden; an Italian Garden; French Formal Rose Garden; Scottish Garden; Alpine Garden; a Shade Garden; a Sunken Garden; Fern & Moss Garden; and seasonal displays.

Bursting blossoms rise from the grounds. Or so it seems.

Along with arrays of other glorious summer blooms.

Curious name, Rotary. Do Rotarians have anything to do with the Rotary Botanic Gardens? Yes, they do.

The garden opened in 1991, occupying “the site of an abandoned sand and gravel quarry on Palmer Drive,” the garden’s web site says. “In 1988, the original site between Lions Beach and Kiwanis Pond was covered with debris and used as storage for the Parks Department and a BMX bicycle racetrack.

“The Gardens’ founder and original visionary, retired orthodontist Dr. Robert Yahr [d. 2021], approached the two Rotary Clubs in Janesville and inquired about their interest in developing a botanical garden for the community to enjoy.”

That they did. Nice work, Dr. Yahr.

The Getty Center

Posted on July 11, 2023 by admin

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.

I don’t work there. I’m not a cop. I do visit from time to time, including early June, when found my way to the Getty Center, a complex perched on a high hill in the Santa Monica Mountains that provides some expansive SoCal vistas.

The 1.8 million or so visitors to the Getty Center every year thus experience something oilman John Paul Getty never did: these views, unless he hiked in the area, which from the little I know about him seems out of character. The Getty Center didn’t exist until well after his death (1976), developed by the Getty Trust and not opened until 1997.

The Getty is one of two branches of the J. Paul Getty Museum; the other is the Getty Villa, which impressed me mightily in early 2020. As a design by Richard Meier, the Getty is a triumph of pale blocks.

Water features.

And flora.

One likable feature of the museum is that you can loaf on its lawns.

“The Getty Center… houses European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, decorative arts, and photography from its beginnings to the present, gathered internationally,” the museum web site says, in one of four buildings named for compass points: North, South, East, West.

Here’s a museum policy other places would do well to emulate: “The Open Content Program makes high-resolution images of public domain artwork from the Getty collections freely available, without restrictions, to advance the research, teaching, and practice of art and art history.”

I wasn’t particularly systematic as I wandered through the galleries. Go here, look at that; marvel at that other work. Rest on a bench (the Getty has some). Repeat. See things both familiar and strange by artists centuries past their lifespans. Sometimes I’m inspired to take my own pics at an art museum, including not just the art, but museumgoers.