St.Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts

Thursday
Quite a bit cooler today, though still bright blue skies and sunshine, but not a beach day, so we drove to St. Petersburg to visit the Museum of Fine Arts. We had visited several years ago, when their Art in Bloom event on, and accordingly I was somewhat focused on the floral arrangements as well as the art, and I don’t think we saw everything, so this time we were able to see everything, including two interesting temporary exhibitions. The first one was quite small, and was entitled Fairyland Lustre: the darkly magical world of Daisy Makeig Jones, an artistic designer with Wedgwood in the first half of the 20th century. She joined the firm as an apprentice painter in 1909, and after two years started to design tableware
Attracted to the fanciful, she began to design Oriental dragon patterns in 1913. She moved on to her signature Fairyland Lustre design in 1915. Although her compositions often were appropriated from major 19thcentury illustrators, it was her unique vision of fairytales, Gaelic legends, Chinese folk stories, and ancient mythology that made Fairyland Lustre ceramics so popular, especially across the Atlantic during the Roaring 20s. The other exhibition, Jewels of the Imagination, was a display of jewelry masterpieces by Mulhouse-born Jean Schlumberger, from the Mellon collection. Inspired by nature, his creations graced such notable style icons as Jacqueline Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn. We enjoyed a very nice lunch in their cafe, and once we had finished the museum, we went for a walk along the waterfront, but it was really quite cool, so we didn’t make it a long one.