A taste of Vatican City in Boston Public Library!

If you are baffled at the title, I would kindly request for you to wait till you scroll down to read the rest of the article! 😀 I am forever a fan of libraries and am one of those people who go crazy for the wooden/rusty smell of old books (Apparently there is a word for it! If you like it as I do, then you are a ‘Biblichor’ 😉 Beat that! ) Anyway, I am a member and a frequent visitor of the brilliant Boston Public Library here in Boston and when I heard there’s an Art and Architecture tour organized by the library every alternate day I was rather surprised! Though the library is huge and there are hundreds of thousands of books, it dint quite look ‘Art and Architecture tour’ worthy to me, from the outside!

So last Friday, I decided to take the tour myself and find out what it is all about. It’s been four days and I am still talking about this tour to my husband and you will know why!

The main entrance of Boston Public Library

Though I am a frequent visitor, the tour helped me looked at everything in the library at a different light, thanks to the 90 minute tour!

Are you noticing the ‘Wall of books’? If you look closely does it not look like Boston Skyline? 😉

So the tour is for the McKim building of the library and when I entered the corridor I noticed how different this part was compared with the rest of the library. Though well-maintained, this building looked much ancient and the architecture was quite vintage compared with the contemporary looking main building of the libary!

The corridor that leads to McKim building

The McKim courtyard – If you are visiting in summer, schedule your visit on a Wednesday night or Friday evening to attend the free concert hosted by BPL 🙂

Our tour guide, Gail

I normally am not a big fan of guided tours in most cases. I feel they put you on a schedule and feed you with too much information than what you could manage let alone remember. But this tour was one of the pleasant ones and it did not have the exact negatives that I mentioned, though it was extremely interesting. Our guide was a sweet lady named Gail and she managed the crowd well. I learnt that Boston Public Library is the third largest library in the US and it was the first library in the US to be made freely accessible to the public irrespective of their educational status, read, public library in the truest sense! 🙂 When it was first opened, this library was proclaimed the ‘Palace of the people’!

One of the McKim’s main doors- Each weights 1500 pounds! The allegorical figure on the left represents Truth and the one on the right Romance! 🙂

The main entrance of McKim’s building has three sets of bronze doors. Each set has a male and female figure engraved in them representing distinct attributes. The one in the centre was my favorite and the male and female figures represent Knowledge and Wisdom respectively! I thought that it was very wise on the creator of these doors, Daniel Chester French to choose a the genders in such a way for these attributes! 🙂 Do you agree? 😉

After crossing this area we enter a vestibule which is made of marble and it’s all marble henceforth, in the building. Charles Follen McKim the architect of this building also spent his own money to build this along with designing the building.

This vestibule had beautiful carvings on the ceiling and the names of famous Bostonians are carved on them

This main staircase is fully made of marble as well. McKim bought three times the marble he needed since he did not want temporary shortage or a delay in delivery to affect the construction.

The lions are the highlight of this area and they are the same marble as the marble elsewhere in the room, but they are unpolished! Also it’s good luck if you rub their tail, apparently! 🙂 and there are six murals in this area which denote the six categories of knowledge (books) that the library shall enrich in an individual!

After climbing the main staircase, you would encounter this gorgeous reading hall called ‘Bates Hall’ named after BPL’s first great benefactor

In the second floor, you can see the mural room! The paintings in this room were breathtaking and it was unofficially called the Sistine Chapel of North Eastern America! (Sistine Chapel is the official residence of the Pope in Vatican City and is world famous for its artwork) These are the work of the great American artist John Singer Sargent on the theme ‘Triumph of Religion’. He believed that spirituality trumps religion which was quite a revolutionary idea for his time. It took 30 years for Sargent to finish the paintings in this mural room!

The best I could get of a picture of the entire room. Sargent designed the lamps, bookshelves and every other object in the room.

 

Below: Moses and the other prophets / Above: Israel being oppressed by the Assyrian king and the Egyptian pharoah

Astarte – the goddess of Sensuality being soulless to see the suffering of the victims of atrocities in the name of religion. You can notice that the painting is 3D, take a closer look at Astarte’s blue necklace and you can see that real precious stones adorn her!

Pagan gods whom the children of Israel went after

The above three paintings are on the Northern end of this room and on the southern side and center of the room Sargent used his paintings to depict heaven and hell, Jesus & his disciples etc. There is another room called the Abbey room with paintings on the theme, ‘The quest of the Holy Grail’ by another renowned painter Edwin Austin Abbey.

I don’t want to elaborately explain all the paintings in the McKim building, their history, symbolism etc. and bore you but if you are intrigued to know more you can click on BPL – McKim building and read up! What I loved about this Abbey room other than the paintings, which were brilliant as well, was the exquisite ceiling with ornamental rafters.

The roof in the Abbey room 😮

For a building built a century and a half before, all the paintings looked relatively new. When we enquired, our guide told us that the whole of McKim building (including all the paintings) was renovated two years back and she showed us the picture of before/after for us to realize that we are lucky they did!

Preview of how the murals must have looked two years back! Thank God for the cleaning activity!

If less than 8 of you are planning to go on this Art and Architecture tour, you don’t even need to schedule an appointment, you can feel free to drop in during the scheduled tour hours!

Why you should do this tour, even if you are not an avid reader?

• If you live in Boston, you SHOULD take this tour (no excuses) and feel proud once again that you live in a wonderful city of rich history and heritage in the US 😉
• If you are visiting in the summer, you can enjoy a concert, read a book, enjoy a snack – all in one place (of course, you have to pay for the food!)
• It’s only an hour long and the tour guides are sweet enough to not make a fuzz if you want to leave in the middle of the tour)
• The library is located in a beautiful place in Back Bay in Boylston street and it is well connected by road and the green line.
• Copley square opposite to the library is gorgeous in all seasons and it is close to other tourist places like the Newbury street, Trinity church etc. which you should consider checking.

This is Old South Church, right across the road from BPL! Did you read the message outside? 🙂

• Imagine getting a coffee and reading your favorite book in a cozy corner in the third largest library in the US! 🙂 and you can get a good coffee and a sandwich in the eatery inside the library itself! Beat that!
• It’s free of cost and you have free wifi too for your instant Instagram/Twitter updates! 😛

Hope you like reading this post! I am off to a faraway land in a few days (Im just kidding, I will be back for the next post on time :D), so if you liked reading the post or have decided to visit the library for the tour or other reasons, pls. do let me know! 😀 Take care!