maryhill museum of art

A few weeks ago we went to visit the Maryhill Museum of Art near Goldendale, Washington. This museum has quite an interesting history. It is located in a mansion that belonged to Samuel Hill in the mid-20th century. The museum was created when Hill collaborated with an eclectic group of three friends: Loïe Fuller, a famous modern dancer in Paris; Queen Marie of Romania, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria; and Alma Bretteville Spreckels, wife of San Francisco sugar magnate Adolf Spreckels.

This summer I've been thinking about museums that were set up by private collectors. When someone told me that the Maryhill was a "collection museum" located in Washington State, we decided to take a day trip and check it out.

View of the museum from the highway. The grounds sit like a lush oasis in the middle of brown, dry Washington/Oregon hills.

You can really see the contrast of the grounds and landscape in this image. There were gigantic, massive white windmills that lined this whole area. The highway went directly underneath some of them; they were fun to see up-close.

This isn't a spectacular view with all of the fence and construction materials (the museum is currently building an extension), but I wanted to show a view of the Columbia River from the museum terrace.

The sculpture garden on the museum grounds was really fantastic. We all loved this sculpture by Matt Cartwright, Malabar Bombax (2009). I especially liked what Cartwright wrote for the text label: "This flower of the Red Silk Cotton tree - with its blooming shape - is a colorful, luscious inspiration to me. . . And perhaps this sculpture can evoke the viewer's inner insect as they buzz from sculpture to sculpture within the Maryhill Sculpture Garden."

Upon entering the museum, the viewer is confronted with a whole gallery full of imperial Romanian art. It's such a bizarre thing to encounter in middle-of-nowhere-Washington! The museum also boasts an extensive Rodin collection among other things. Granted, the Rodin pieces are mostly plaster casts and studies, but it still is fun to see.

One of the most unusual, unexpected features of Maryhill Museum is the full-scale replica of Stonehenge, which is just located about 4 miles south of the museum grounds. When Samuel Hill visited Stonehenge in England, he was told that the Neolithic monument was used for human sacrifices to pagan gods. (Side note: that theory is no longer accepted by most scholars.) After WWI, Hill returned to the US and built a war memorial to commemorate the soldiers who sacrificed their own lives. Granted, Hill's concrete memorial is quite different from the megaliths of in England, but it is still an impressive structure. It's also cool to stand here and get an actual sense of Stonehenge's original scale (since today so many stones are missing from the English monument).

A view of the Columbia River from the Stonehenge replica. What a juxtaposition!

If any Washingtonians are interested in checking out the Maryhill Museum of Art, let me know! I'd love to go again.