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Art, culture, football, friends - and the journey need not be long
Photo Courtesy of Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University
Peter Paul Rubens painted the equestrian portrait of the Duke of Lerma on view in the exhibition.
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Published: September 28, 2008
Updated: 09/27/2008 08:15 pm
SOMEWHERE IN THE TRIANGLE AREA - During the summer, there was quite a buzz about "stay-cations." Faced with high gas prices, some people were spending their vacations at home, taking advantage of simple pleasures and visiting the local attractions that we too often overlook unless out-of-town visitors want to see them.
My husband and I tried a different twist on that theme recently, not quite a stay-cation, but not much of a journey, either. It all started when we realized that the Navy-Duke football game in Durham fell on the same day as the wedding at Fearrington Village near Pittsboro of the daughter of some old friends. Fortunately, the game was at noon and the wedding festivities began at 6:30, so we could attend both. But an overnight stay seemed to be in order.
Weeks earlier, my husband had mounted a brochure about the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh on our refrigerator. We agreed that we ought to go see the exhibition before it closed up on Dec. 28. And then we never seemed to find a good time to drive to Raleigh.
So, if we were going to spend some time in the Triangle area anyway, we reasoned, why not take an extra day and go to the museum? One idea led to another, and we decided to take the camper so we'd have an inexpensive place to stay. We'd drive down Thursday, set up camp and visit the museum on Friday.
But wait, there's more. We'd been hearing daily on public radio about the Spanish art exhibition that's at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University through Nov. 9. That was something else that we never seemed to get around to visiting. Maybe we could go to Durham Friday morning and then head on over to Raleigh in the afternoon.
I called a friend in Raleigh to let him know we were planning to be in the area for a few days, and we made plans to meet for dinner Friday night. We wanted to camp at the Jordan Lake State Recreation Area, a relatively central location close to the site of the wedding, the event that would keep us out latest at night, and a place we'd been meaning to visit in hopes of seeing the resident eagles. We'd be taking advantage of half a dozen opportunities in one trip to the Triangle area.
Of course, everything wasn't going to come together quite that easily.
When we pulled our camper up to a campground entrance at Jordan Lake Thursday afternoon, we were greeted by a sign that told us the gate locks at 8 p.m. and any vehicles parked by the road WOULD be towed. We've camped in many states and across half of Canada, in public and private campgrounds, and never have we encountered an 8 p.m. curfew. With a little help from a friend with Internet access, we found a commercial campground nearby that would let us keep grown-up hours.
There was another snag on Friday afternoon, when we arrived at the Natural Sciences Museum to find throngs of schoolchildren out front and grim-faced employees barring the doors because a fire alarm had sounded. We did eventually get in and spent a fascinating couple of hours with the scrolls, which I wrote about in last Sunday's column.
But snags aside, most of the long weekend was great. The "El Greco to Velazquez" exhibition at Duke's Nasher Museum would have been worth the trip in itself. I will leave it to Tom Patterson, who is to write about the exhibition next month, to give the art critic's perspective. My average tourist's perspective is that it was a wonderful way to spend a couple of hours. The art works were varied and of high quality, and the exhibition did a marvelous job of putting them into context in the political and cultural world of 17th century Spain as well as in the development of art. The earlier works were dominated by religious themes, as was life in Spain in general. There are portraits of royalty and nobility of the day, in all their splendor. Later works include beautifully detailed early still lifes.
A great story surrounds the exhibition. It all started back in 1987, when Sarah Schroth was a graduate student at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. The reign of Philip III of Spain was widely considered to have been something of a dud as far as visual art went, greatly overshadowed by the art collections of Philip II and Philip IV. Schroth thought that was odd, since Spanish literature had been flourishing at the time. Her curiosity and painstaking work led her to discover an inventory of an extensive collection of art that had belonged to the Duke of Lerma, Philip III's right-hand man. Eventually, she had her dissertation and recognition as having made a major art-history discovery. She tracked down many of the paintings, some of them hanging, unprotected and barely noticed, in out-of-the-way buildings across Spain. And after Schroth came to work at Duke, and the Nasher Museum opened its top-notch new building in 2005, she was in a position to work with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to borrow paintings from museums and churches in Europe and mount the first comprehensive exhibition of the art of the period. Never again will Philip III's reign be considered lacking when it comes to the visual arts.
So, you need not travel far to have a great vacation. You can take a stay-cation and enjoy the rich opportunities in our backyard, or spend a few days seeing what the neighbors down the road have to offer. Maybe folks from the Triangle will return the favor and spend a long weekend up this way from time to time. When that campground at Tanglewood finally opens, I hope it doesn't have an early curfew.
Linda Brinson is the Journals editorial-page editor. She can be reached at lbrinson@wsjournal.com.
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