The Cummer Museum and the Gardens That Frame the River

An Art Collection Rooted in the Riverbank

The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens sits on Riverside Avenue in Riverside, its back to the St. Johns River, and it has the particular atmosphere of a place that was once a private home and still remembers the intimacy. Ninah Cummer and her husband Arthur built their estate here in 1903, and Ninah spent the next fifty years filling it with art - European paintings, Meissen porcelain, Japanese woodblock prints - and filling the grounds with gardens that descend in terraces to the river's edge. When she died in 1958, she left it all to the city, and the museum that bears her name has been expanding the collection ever since.

I visited on a Tuesday afternoon in January, entering through the modern wing - a 1990s addition that connects to the original estate buildings with the restrained good taste of an architect who understood that the older structures were the point. The permanent collection is arranged chronologically, and I moved through it slowly, from medieval panel paintings with gold leaf backgrounds to a room of Impressionists that included a small Monet water lily study so casually displayed I almost walked past it. The collection is not encyclopedic - it is personal, shaped by one woman's taste and expanded by curators who respected her preferences. The result is a museum that feels curated in the original sense - chosen, not accumulated.

The Wark Collection of early Meissen porcelain is the surprise. An entire gallery is devoted to these eighteenth-century German ceramics - tea services, figurines, decorative plates - and they are breathtaking in their precision and absurdity. Tiny porcelain monkeys in powdered wigs. Shepherdesses with expressions of permanent mild alarm. A tea set decorated with insects so realistically painted that I checked twice to confirm they were not real. The Meissen factory was the first in Europe to produce true hard-paste porcelain, and the collection here is one of the finest in the world, which makes its presence in Jacksonville a wonderful incongruity.

But the gardens are why I keep returning. Three distinct garden spaces - the English Garden, the Italian Garden, and the Olmsted Garden - descend from the museum to the river, each one a different mood. The Italian Garden is the most dramatic: a series of reflecting pools flanked by clipped hedges and anchored by a fountain, with the St. Johns River visible at the far end, brown and moving and alive, an uncontrollable counterpoint to the geometric perfection of the plantings. The Olmsted Garden - designed by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted - is wilder, more naturalistic, with live oaks and azaleas and a winding brick path that leads to a bench overlooking the water.

Here is the detail most visitors miss: in the Italian Garden, look at the ground beneath the oak trees. The roots have lifted the brick pavers over decades, creating a gentle undulation in the path - the garden is being slowly reshaped by the trees it contains, a negotiation between human design and natural force that neither side is winning and neither side is losing. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday. The gardens are always free. Go for the Monet, stay for the porcelain monkeys, and end on the riverbank, where the garden gives way to the water and the water does not care about symmetry.