The Loneliest Place in Seattle

... or so it was last Friday morning.  We had a few hours to kill; it was misty and chilly and we didn't want to go far.  But we found ourselves more or less next door to the Seattle Asian Art Museum.  As luck would have it, this was "seniors-get-in-free" day, so we joined the H-- no, actually, it wasn't quite that.  In fact, so far as I could see, we two seniors were the only two visitors of any sort for the first hour or so after opening, two of only a dozen for the next hour.

Kinda makes you wonder what Dr. Richard H. Fuller would think--he being, it seems, the seedbed donor behind the whole enterprise.  Would he have preferred to take his beneficence to San Francisco, say, or maybe Shanghai?


Can't answer that one, of course, but I kind of feel for him: this collection is small but for its size surprisingly diverse and representative.  Also well curated: instructive labeling of a quality that would not disgrace the best of museums.  That's a Tang horse at right, unencumbered by the dramatic pigmentation you expect from Tang statues, but how many artists before Bernini can capture so much dynamic energy?  At left is a Buddha at the moment of Enlightenment; perhaps he just discovered that the Vietnam War was not fought between North and South Koreans.  Anyway, definitely worth a side trip, even if you are not just killing time.