Gorgeous Boston Public Library Tour

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Time Codes:
0:00- Intro
2:45- Staircase
4:00- Abbey Room
5:25- Bates Hall
9:25- Sargent Gallery Murals
13:00- Map Room Tea Lounge
14:35- Courtyard Garden
16:50- Boston Public Library's Johnson Building


The Boston Public Library was founded in 1848 and opened in 1854 as the first large free municipal library in the U.S. (Boston also has an even older members-only library, the Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Hill, which opened in 1809 and has its own art and rare books collection.)

It welcomes over 2.2 million visitors every year-researchers, art and architecture lovers, and Boston residents who simply want a quiet place to read or to find a book to check out and take home.
Entrance Hall and Staircase:
Walk around a bit and absorb the spectacular murals and mosaics, the enormous vaulted reading rooms, and the painted ceilings. Art, architecture, and engineering merge perfectly.

Inside, there's almost too much to take in with a quick glance. On the white marble floor of the entrance hall, you'll find inlays of zodiac symbols and inscriptions. Look up, and you'll see names of 30 famous Bostonians on the vaulted ceiling.
Now, go up the staircase, and notice the fossil shells embedded in the marble, which was quarried in France. Where the stairs split into two separate sections, you'll see two enormous lions carved from single blocks of marble. Each of them commemorates a Massachusetts Civil War infantry regiment.

On both the second and third floors, you'll find galleries with displays of the library's rare books and fine art.

As you walk up the stairs past the marble lions, you'll see a series of lovely murals done in shades of pale blue, pale green, and ivory. They were painted by by French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes - his only murals on display outside of France.

Although you have probably never heard of Puvis de Chavannes (most people today haven't), 19th century Europeans regarded him as a top French painter and muralist whose work combined elements of Romanticism and Symbolism.

Each mural depicts an aspect of science or literature embodied in the library: poetry, history, science, and philosophy.
The magnificent Bates Reading Room, named in honor of the Library's first major benefactor occupies the entire front half of the second floor where light streams through the high arched windows. You can spot him among the busts of prominent late 19th century literary Bostonians scattered around the room, and there's also a portrait of him at the south end.
On the third floor, you'll find a room with the John Singer Sargent murals along the walls and vaulted sky-lit ceilings.

The great American painter considered these murals to be his most important work, created over a period of 29 years between 1890 and 1919.

Titled The Triumph of Religion and painted in the style of Italian Renaissance frescos, the murals depict the development of world religions of interest to Sargent - Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity - and are strikingly different from his refined society portraits that you can see in the Museum of Fine Arts.

The ornate barrel-vaulted ceiling of intricately molded plaster soars 50 feet high. The room itself is 218 feet long and 42.5 feet wide. Be sure to look at the gorgeous terrazzo floor crafted from yellow, white, and black Italian and Belgian marble - a 1931 replacement for the original.

The English oak bookcases surrounding the room and heavy oak tables are original, although the chairs are modern reproductions.

If you have a book with you, find a place to sit and read for awhile.
Sargent had long chafed at his reputation as a "society painter" and hoped these murals would cause his public to regard him in a new light.

They did - but not in the way he hoped.

Leading art critics such as Bernard Berenson panned his new work. Others took issue with displays of religious scenes in a secular building.

But the biggest objections related to his attempt to show a "progression" of beliefs from pagan ignorance to Jewish law to increasingly liberal forms of Christian faith, culminating in 1919 when he installed what is now called the "synagogue" panel in which he chose to use a medieval motif depicting Judaism as a blindfolded old woman with a crown falling off her head as she clutches a book and holds a broken scepter. This stereotype, seen also in European cathedrals from the Middle Ages, conveyed the idea that Christianity had replaced a "broken" Judaism.

Outrage and calls for removal derailed his work on the murals, even though he insisted that he had not intended to demean or defame Judaism. The final mural, meant to depict the Sermon on the Mount described in the Christian New Testament, was still unfinished when he died in 1925 and the panel where he'd planned to mount it remains blank.

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