Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts, United States

5Gene R J 5:00 PM Jun 9, 2021

A great museum that brought the world to Salem.
We bought our 10 AM timed tickets online($18 ea senior), donned our face masks and picked up a floor plan to optimize our visit. This new 2003 building, combining 2 museums that date back to 1800, has 6 acres of floor space containing a large entry hall with gift shops, lots of exhibition halls and curvilinear hallways. I asked a docent for directions to the first floor's permanent collection, Maritime Art. After this, a docent pointed us to an elevator to the 3rd floor where we then walked down through the often unconnected exhibit halls. The quality of the historic collection, both from returning 19th sailing sea captains and subsequent museum purchases, is very high quality with excellent notations and some interesting stories, so the progression was slow. After 3 hours we were exhausted but felt we had done a good job. Some of our favorites were; 1279 Japanese Jizu Bosatsu, 1750 "Two-headed equestrian figurehead."(one of the oldest in the world and the only double-headed form), Salem native Nathaniel Bowditch published "The New American Practical Navigator" in 1802 and is still carried on U.S. Naval vessels, 1863 Maritime Journal of the "Tarquin", 1790 Indonesian Two-stem smoking pipe, 1899 "Tea Production in China", 1790 "Contemplation by the Sea", 1837 Chinese Sewing Table, 1725 Chinese screen made for Sir John Eccleston, 1656 1300 pound Chinese bell(inscribed with 5000 characters from the Heart and Diamond Sutras), 2015 "All the Flowers Are for Me," by Anita Quayyum Agha. This is a great museum that brought the world to Salem.

5LoveUFLoveFLA 5:00 PM Oct 31, 2020

Wonderful Halloween Visit
We enjoyed this museum on our Halloween visit to Salem. We were able to purchase tickets ahead of time when other museums were already sold out. Unfortunately, we were unable to secure tickets to the separately ticketed exhibits. Workers were observed cleaning very frequently.