Unlike my previous road trip recommendation this one means you have to leave the state. Still, visiting the Yale University Art Gallery is well worth the trip. Like Harvard, Yale has a remarkable collection and the galleries are small enough that it can be taken in over the course of an afternoon.
It’s a couple of hours from Boston. We did it as an add-on trip coming back from New York. That’s a pretty great way to do it as it breaks up the drive nicely. We added lunch at Heirloom.
There are some real standouts in the collection. Van Gogh’s Le café de nuit is the most obvious blockbuster, but as you can see you can slo take in works by artists as diverse as Manet, Basquiat, Motherwell and Bronzino over the course of an afternoon. I was personally very impressed with the excellent collection of works by the American Thomas Eakins. It was the best concentration of his work I’ve seen outside of Philadelphia and it was a real highlight of the afternoon.
