Boston Museum of Fine Art

 Glass Sculpture at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts 2-3-12

Gus and I spent a few hours at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts on Friday. It was out first time ever to visit and the place is massive! I really liked this towering glass sculpture in the Sharpiro Family Courtyard. Since we came in the Fenway entrance it was one of the first things we saw! We spent about 4 hours there and then came home. There was so much to see, we will definitely have to go back again!

 

 

 

 Narcissus on the Campagne by Elizabeth Lyman Boott c1872

Of all the magnificent and famous paintings in the museum, this tender little flower in the corner of a room we were passing through caught my eye. I fell in love with it and was surprised to learn it was painted by a female American Artist from the 1800’s. Her name was Elizabeth Lyman Boott and the information next to the painting said that she died at age 40 from an illness and her effigy was displayed behind me. I looked at the painting for awhile, then turned to see the effigy.

Elizabeth Lyman Boott Effigy carved by her husband, Frank Duveneck

She looked so sweet, peaceful and beautiful and I couldn’t get her out of my mind. When I went searching for information on this artist I was surprised to read this tragic love story:

Lizzie dies young

Early in 1888, the little family returned to Paris where Duveneck reconnected with his Munich friends. Lizzie, saddled with a child, husband and elderly father, had a new view of Parisian life. But despite it all, she took up watercolors again, and she and Duveneck submitted work to the jury for the 1888 Paris Salon.

On the day the jury voted, Lizzie went to bed with a chill. Four days later she died of pneumonia.

Duveneck returned to the States in 1889, placed his son in the care of the Boott family in Boston at the insistence of his father-in-law, and settled in Cincinnati where he worked on a funerary monument for his beloved wife's grave.

A simple effigy covered with a palm leaf was cast in bronze and later copied in plaster - one awarded an honorable mention at the Salon of 1895 - and sent to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (among others) where his son could see it.

James traveled to Florence to see the bronze memorial and wrote to Lizzie's father, "One sees, in its place and its ambiente, what a meaning and eloquence the whole thing has - and one is touched to tears by this particular example which comes home to one so-of the jolly great truth that it is art alone that triumphs over fate."

 

You can read the entire story by clicking on this link: Elizabeth Lyman Boott 

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