Back in November, when we first moved to Houston, I saw a few very pretty ads for an upcoming summer art exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. The ads were showing a lovely picture of a gorgeous stately home that looked very similar to my idea of Pride and Prejudice’s Pemberley. The anglophile in me naturally was intrigued.
A mere 8 months later, The Houghton Hall: Portrait of an English Country House exhibit is here! I had been itching to make my way to the MFAH since the exhibit’s opening and finally found some time to do so over the weekend.
My friend Jenna and I ditched the husbands for the day and gladly escaped the 100 degree weather to explore Houghton Hall’s finery as well as the rest of galleries in this huge museum.
Along with all of the splendor that you would expect to be on display in a fine English home, there were also walls upon walls of stunning and priceless paintings that the estate’s residents, the Cholmondeley family, had collected.
The painting below is of this old family, the owners Houghton Hall. I love how casual they seem, while at the same time they are all dressed in their stuffy formal finery.
We oohed and ahhed over all of the lovely furniture and finery.
Most of the paintings on display were what you would imagine, stuffy portraits of aristocratic Brits and paintings of their hunting dogs in the countryside. All perfectly beautiful, but expected.
I loved stumbling upon this one portrait below. Her wild curly hair is amazing! It’s fun to imagine who this woman may have been and what her life must have been like all those years ago.
Jenna and I really enjoyed the exhibit, and compared quite a bit of what we saw to our friends at Downton Abbey, as if we actually knew them. “Oh, that woman in the painting looks just like Edith!”
We then set off to explore the rest of the museum, getting lost upstairs in the rooms and rooms of beautiful art.
Is it just me or…is this little boy holding some sort of old fashioned lacrosse stick?
I’m pretty sure that it just may be a fancy tennis racket of the renaissance era.
After immersing ourselves into the past, we ventured through a neon tunnel under the museum to another building, which housed the popular Soto Exhibit.
This contemporary art exhibit houses 24,000 PVC tubes that are hand painted and tied to hang two stories from the ceiling.
Everyone was interacting with the installation, just running around and playing in it. I definitely felt almost like a little kid again, pretending to swim in and out of the gooey strings. Such a fun experience!
And now the end of the post, where we are on my favorite subject: style. Let me tell you about this pretty ditty of a
necklace that I’m wearing….
It was part of
GroopDealz daily deals a few weeks ago and it was only FIVE dollars. FIVE! You can’t even get a sandwich for $5 dollars these days.
GroopDealz posts new items everyday at deeply discounted prices. If you like something you see, grab it before its gone the next day!
This necklace just arrived in the mail and I was not sure what to expect, with the low price tag and all. But the quality is really great and the orange stones are actually pretty heavy. I feel like it will go with just about anything in my closet.
Here are a few of my favorite pieces that the site is listing at the moment, all under $10.
Shop jewelry at GroopDealz
Hope you enjoyed taking a little tour of MFAH with me today! If you’re in the Houston area at all this summer, be sure to check out the Houghton Hall exhibit! Its nice to take a little trip to Europe for the afternoon, without the bothersome jet lag. 🙂
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*this is a sponsored post by GroopDealz. All opinions are my own.*
