The Peacock Room

Just this past Thursday, Diggory and I met up with our friend Colleen to take a quick stroll through the Freer Gallery of Art. I have to admit, it's one of my most favorite museums in the whole wide world, and this day was going to be extra special. Once a month, on every third Thursday at noon, the shutters in the Peacock Room are opened in conjunction with the exhibition The Peacock Room Comes to America. We met Colleen in the garden between the National Museum of African Art and the Sackler Gallery, between Jefferson Drive and Independence Avenue SW on the National Mall, and navigated our way through the Sackler and into the Freer Gallery of Art. I won't go into the nitty gritty details on how we did it. I've been to these two museums many times, and I still get a little turned around. Add in the stroller, and I'm a total mess. Luckily, with two people, if we encountered stairs, we just picked up the babe and kept going. But, if you'd rather go the complete stroller-friendly route, enter the Freer at the Independence Ave. entrance and use the elevator on the south side of the building to travel between floors. And if you need directions on how to get to the Sackler, ask at the information desk or speak with any of the friendly Smithsonian security officers.

Oh, and I should mention that the closest Metro station is the Smithsonian station. The station elevator is on Independence Ave., which will be about a half a block from the museum's entrance. If you get off the Metro at the L'Enfant Plaza station like we did, you'll want to follow the signs to the "Smithsonian Museums" and exit via the elevator at the 7th Street/Maryland Ave. entrance. You'll pop up on 7th Street, so just walk north toward the Hirshhorn Museum and turn left onto Independence Ave. Walk three blocks to the Freer.

We arrived at the Peacock Room just as the docent was starting her talk about the history of the space and why it appears as it does today. I won't go into the detail here. There's plenty of well-written information on the museum's website, as well as an image gallery and panoramic view tool. But, I do have to say, that having seen the Peacock Room with the shutters closed on numerous occasions, I was still completely in awe of how beautiful the space is, and how different it looks in natural light. Please go see it for yourself if you can. The next shutters opening is on April 19th from 12pm-5:30pm.

Diggory was well behaved through the whole talk. (I'm lucky. He usually is.) Colleen let Diggory play with her ID badge, though she may have regretted it after receiving it back in a slightly more moist condition. I didn't catch most of the talk as I was busy snapping pictures, and taking advantage of having another set of eyes to watch the babe. What I did hear, however, was fascinating, and everyone seemed genuinely captivated.

After the docent's talk, we took a few more moments to relish in the beauty and spot a few more details in the craftsmanship, ornamentation, various ceramics, and other splendid accouterments. There's even a tiny ceramic cat above the mantel, near the left corner of the frame surrounding the fantastic painting The Princess from the Land of Porcelain. And here's the cat. Then we took a quick spin through the permanent collection galleries, mainly for the purposes of being able to legitimately consider this a blog-worthy museum visit. We lingered longer in the two rooms of paintings by James McNeill Whistler, one of my all time favorite artists. Be sure to seek out more of his works at the Freer in the exhibitions Sweet Silent Thought: Whistler's Interiors, on view through this summer, and Freer & Whistler: Points of Contact, on view indefinitely.

We also slowed our pace in the room of Japanese screens. We were particularly drawn to a pair of six-paneled screens by Hokusai depicting each of the twelve months, titled appropriately Birds, Animals, and Plants Representing the Twelve Months. If Diggory were a few years older, we could have had a great conversation about this work of art.

Although I'm sure we could have spent much more time at the museum, we needed to grab lunch and return Colleen to her place of work. If you have a spare moment, be sure to grab a chair in the museum's lovely courtyard for a moment of quiet reflection. But, like I said we didn't have time! We marched straight up to the National Museum of the American Indian for a delicious meal of razor clam pot pie and huckleberry fritters in the Mitsitam Cafe. Yum. NMAI will be a future entry on this blog, I'm just sure of it.

And, one last thought... This doesn't count as a Museum + Momma entry, mainly because Diggory wasn't with me and we had already visited anyway, but also on Thursday, Daddy and Momma went to the opening reception for the new exhibition The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. I've never seen anything quite like it - it's the first of it's kind after all, and a definite must see! Plus, you get to play Pac Man and Myst inside a museum. Check it out, it's on view through September 30, 2012.

Until next time...happy museuming!