377 days - Blog #62, decorating ideas

So while most of New England was concentrating on Fenway Park, I took my aunt and her friend over to Fenway Court today.

I haven’t been back to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum since they declined my application to be a docent- a sincerely competitive process, from which I was eliminated because I had to work full time to supplement my docent hours… and thus didn’t have enough ‘free’ time to grant them.  I actually get why that happened… but it was one of those events in my history that helped turn my eyes away from Boston back to Central Mass.

All that said, it is a GREAT museum.  We are very lucky in Massachusetts to have that, the MFA… and another amazing collection of art in Worcester.  But the Gardner is unique… and very much connected to everything that I still love about Beauport.

If you are new to my writing and are unfamiliar with Beauport, I encourage you to go – or for the now, I have written a few blogs about working there.  It is a very unique house, with each room having a theme of light, color, furniture, etc.  The Gardner has some similar elements in the way the art is collected and displayed, frozen in time for over 100 years.  There is no small accident to the parallels, as Mrs. Gardner was a frequent visitor to Eastern Point and friend to its residents.  (I completely geeked out this afternoon when I saw the portrait of A. Piatt Andrew and explained to my aunt that I had a historical crush on him, in spite of the fact he was a founding member of the Federal Reserve Bank.)  And then when she passed on, Henry Sleeper was one of the first directors of the museum.

So… while, it wasn’t exactly the same as Beauport, a visit to the Gardner filled my brain with the same electricity of ideas.  In other words, ideas of how to decorate.

Now, I definitely don’t have the Gardner name or fortune.  I don’t have the Sleeper name to mask my lack of fortune.  But I very much like the concept of themed rooms – of making a space represent a room or hall from another time or other place.  It’s something I often told myself as I walked through the tours of that Gloucester house of wonders that I would find a way (money) to do to a house in which I lived someday.

Well… I don’t have the money.  But I do have the someday.  I have a house in which I have freedom to paint as I please… so why not paint as I please with a bit of fun?

I have absolutely no idea what it means.  I just know I have some excellent reference material to inspire me.