Not since I lived in London have I spent time in a city with so many wonderful museums! Where even the views from the front porches are spectacular (the photo above is from the front lawn of the Adler Planetarium).
As a bonus, like in London, most of them were free—for us at least, thanks to my recent inspired purchase of a family membership at our local Witte. Hooray for reciprocal admission!Although we didn't have too much time in the city, we made the most of it, and visited four amazing museums.
The Art Institute (the one we had to pay for, but boy! was it worth it!) actually lets you take pictures of their paintings, so it's not surprising most of the photos we took were of their fabulous stuff.
I've been in some great art museums over the years (the American and British National Galleries, for example, and both London Tates). But I don't think I've ever been in a museum that offered so many paintings famous for their inclusion in Dr. Brown's History of Art class (still one of my favorite college courses).
In addition to the Magritte above on the left, here are a few more examples:
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| Cézanne, perhaps my favorite Impressionist-era painter (for some reason not in the Artic's online catalog?) |
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| a breathtakingly beautiful Renior |
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| a haunting Monet (they have so many of his it was hard to decide which one to show you, but this one is so unusual, it got the nod; curiously also not in the catalog) |
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| detail from perhaps their most famous painting, Seurat's Sunday on La Grand Jatte |
And of course I always get a kick out of well-executed trompe l'oeils (although the best is still the one we saw in Vicenza)...
The other museums we visited are the types—science- and history-related—that we usually like better than art museums (although we might make an exception this time—the Art Institute was really that good).
First we went to the Museum of Science & Industry, largely on the recommendation of friends that we see their German submarine...yes, really! The picture on the right is of a bunk area in the sub, which we toured, complete with a torpedo as bedside table.
Not only was the sub enormous (see the picture below, with a few museum visitors in it for scale) and a fascinating artifact, but the story of its capture and move to the museum was a great story.
What a unique exhibit! And another example of my maxim that there are an infinity of stories that can be told about World War II.
Other highlights of our much-too-brief visit at this museum were the model trains...
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| ending up the journey from Chicago to Seattle |
Our quickest visit was to the Planetarium, and unfortunately we didn't have enough time to see any of the shows. As it was, our bus having to compete with traffic from a pre-season football game made us late to our nephew's wedding—the actual reason for our being in Chicago in the first place!
(BTW, congratulations to Collins and Julianna, and thanks for getting hitched in this glorious city, giving us a reason to visit it!)
In addition to the great view of the downtown skyline the Planetarium offers, they had a lot of good exhibits inside that almost made up for our missing their special entertainments. We spent a good bit of our time looking at their Apollo 13 stuff, and I thought this graphic depiction of human exploration of the solar system was very clever; each line represents a mission to that heavenly body:
The most famous museum we saw was the Field, and we really barely scratched its surface, in spite of spending three hours there.
I particularly enjoyed all their Native American exhibits, including this exquisite beadwork, which always impresses me:
Their main hall, home of the famous T-rex, Sue, is impressive enough...
...but when you consider that the galleries around it on two levels are chock-full of fascinating exhibits, you can begin to understand the scope of the place.
Here's another shot, from one of the second-floor side halls, of some selfie-taking tourists:
The only good thing about not being able to see enough of these great museums is that we know there will be plenty of interesting things awaiting us on future visits!
