Got up early to shower off yesterday’s sweat, have a hearty breakfast and get to the Museum of Fine Arts for a 3 hour tour with Context Travel.  We used the hotel’s shuttle service to take us to the museum. Our driver complained about his concern about the NHL and how much he disliked Gary Bettman.  Scott liked the guy right away.

We arrived at the museum to find the other people on our tour are the same couple we met at our North End Boston tour.
The newly renovated area just past the entry area with a cafe and a Dale Chihuly glass sculpture.

The Museum of Fine Arts has a huge collection with one of the biggest collections in North America of Japanese and ancient Egyptian art, but best of all, it allows photos.  This is some of what we saw.

Copley “Watson and the Shark”

The above is a copy made by Copley because he liked the original so much.  The original is in Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art.  There’s a photo in my DC posting.

Paul Revere

 

Winslow Homer

 

Tiffany glass window

 

dome murals by John Singer Sargeant

 

Rembrandt

 

Turner

After over three hours of looking through the museum, we stopped for lunch at the museum where we could sit outside.

 

Despite the lovely setting, we moved on to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum which is only about a three minute walk away.  Unfortunately, they do not allow photos in the museum which is the former mansion of Isabella Stewart Gardner built in a Venetian style specifically to accommodate the massive amount of art she collected.

We then walked almost 2 miles towards our dinner destination stopping to shop at a couple of big shopping malls along the way.  Scott bought a ring but we found no museum t shirts or other interesting souvenir items 😦

 

As we walked, we saw this church and reflecting pool:

 

Dinner was at Masa, described as a nouvelle Southwest menu.  The food was highly spiced but not unpleasantly hot.

squash artichoke salad

 

tuna

 

spicy lamb

 

steak frites with spicy sauce

 

The sun is setting here before 7:30 but does not cool down very fast.  We’ve been surprised how warm it is even after a rain, which has happened the last two nights, but luckily for us, it has rained while we were inside having dinner and so we have managed to avoid walking in the rain. Saturday, we got back to the hotel to see the Blue Jays and Red Sox facing a second evening of rain delays for their baseball game.