Displaying items by tag: bedroom

Visitors to house museums always ask for details about the original owners’ daily routines, particularly their sleeping habits. So researchers at several of these museums are improving the historical accuracy of furnishings in bedchambers where famous and forgotten lives began and ended.

“There’s so much fantasy and myth around beds,” said Natalie Larson, an expert on historic textiles in Williamsburg, Va. Ms. Larson is helping revamp dozens of museum sleeping quarters. She quoted a favorite 17th-century French poem: “In bed we laugh, in bed we cry, and born in bed, in bed we die.”

This past Sunday, 75 Van Gogh paintings including Sunflowers, Irises, and Bedroom, were pulled off the walls of Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and transported across the city in an armored car. The masterpieces will be on view for the next seven months at the Hermitage, an Amsterdam dependency of the Russian state museum, while the Van Gogh Museum undergoes renovations.

Moving irreplaceable works of art proved to be no easy task. Each painting was loaded onto felt-covered trolleys and taken to a workshop where they were wrapped in protective insulation and then packed into hard-shell carrying cases. The cases were then assigned code numbers to keep the paintings’ identities under wraps. The decidedly huge undertaking went off without a hitch.

The Hermitage’s Van Gogh exhibit opens on Saturday, September 29^th and will run through mid-April. The revamped Van Gogh Museum is slated to re-open on April 25, 2013.