Typical Art Museum by Ebie Quinn

My experience with the Clark Museum was pretty so-so. It is located in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It became open to the public in 1955.  As a museum, it was fine, it had many fascinating and pretty pieces of art, but as a viewer I wasn’t as engaged as I wished to be. This might be as a result of visiting more modern museums, because in contrast this museum kind of fell flat. I’m not trying to dissuade you from seeing it, in fact quite the opposite. I think you should go see it for yourself, form your own opinion, prove me wrong! It has many great pieces of art and I’m sure there are many people who would appreciate it, and I certainly appreciated parts of it. Overall though, it felt kind of bland.

            The Clark Museum has a pretty extensive history which is a featured and discussed at length in the museum. I found the history to actually be quite interesting. The museum was founded by Sterling Clark. Clark went on an expedition to China in 1908, was introduced to the world of collecting art in Paris in 1910, and married Francine Clary in 1919. Sterling and Francine began collecting lots of American and European art, including prints and drawings, sculpture, decorative arts, and paintings. Most of the artwork they collected is French, and there is a lot of impressionist paintings.

            I was assigned to look at a room filled with all glassware. The glassware didn’t particularly appeal to me, I looked it over but to me it seemed to belong in a kitchen not a museum. There were two paintings tucked away on the sides of the rooms and I did enjoy those. The painting I liked the best was called “The Suitor”. It depicted a women in a beautiful flowing white dress standing at her door. The room she is in is very fancy and nice. It has a decorated table with beautiful white flowers sitting on top of it. Behind the flowers and table, there is a long mirror and the reflections rather blurry, but there are many colors, the most prominent being yellow. The wall is decorated with some sort of design and overall the room feels very classy and expensive. The door the women is looking at is cracked open and it is very blurry but you can see a man on his knees, kissing the women's hand. The whole picture is blurred and it gives off a sort of dreamy feeling. The man is the most blurred, and at first glance, he is not even visible. There is no description of the painting, just the title, “The Suitor”. The artist is Gaston de Latouche, and the painting is oil on panel. I really like this picture because it feels so simple and dream-like. It captured my attention for a while, and was just generally fun to look at.

            So, yes, overall the museum was pretty run of the mill for me, but there were certainly many wonderful pieces of art to view and appreciate. Give it a chance, especially if you are into art or museums in general.