Hemingway's Art Collection

Apparently Papa was a fan of Cezanne. I'm not sure if any Cezannes hang in the house (and I don't know how to add a special character here like an accent mark for the painter's name), but I loved the collection of paintings on the wall in the narrow hallway that runs parallel between the dining room and the living room. (Up the stairs and to the right is the bedroom.) Some are Cezanneish, and many depict--surprise, surprise--fishermen at sea.

I also liked these two sculptures below, which are in the master bedroom. They face the bed, playing their instruments at your feet. How stressful! A drumroll before dozing off! I would have to have them in the corner of the room. Less confrontational.

Hemingway's (Pauline's) Furniture

The living room of Hemingway's Key West house is filled with some of the furnishings that Pauline, Hemingway's wife, collected in Paris. This feels like a lady's room...

Below, entering the living room pictured above, please note the door. It does not fit the frame's shape or width. What?

Below, a close-up of the 18th-century walnut dining room table and chairs with studded fasteners. Very cool. Again, Pauline's collection...

Finca Vigia, Hemingway's Home in Cuba

Two of my friends just returned from Cuba, where they visited Hemingway's home. Called Finca Vigia, Spanish for "Lookout Residence" or "Lookout Farm," it's a museum of some sort that you can't enter. But you can look into it, they say, and they did--and they cannot believe how similar Hemingway's house in Cuba is to the one in Key West. Same pool! Same studio! Same weird fans in the studio! How strange... One of these friends may do a guest post on the Cuban home, but until then, check out this photo of Hemingway in the dining room of Finca Vigia. (Sorry this photo is uncredited; anyone know where it's from? It's used online with no source.) This room and the furniture is so similar to Papa's home in Key West. He and Pauline, the wife, decided that the dining room would be the only room in the house with no books. Cats, though? Yeah, cats are OK.

Hemingway's Dining Room

I wish I got a picture of the entire dining room, but there were too many tourists in the frame. Sorry! Anyway, above is a corner of the dining room, which is painted pale blue. A portrait of the resident hangs above the fireplace. Why not.

Below is a photo of the room I took from the the Hemingway Home and Museum website. You can see better the construction of the 18th-century Spanish dining table and chairs in my detail pics below. The table was found by Hemingway's wife Pauline; she loved antiques. She also loved chandeliers. One of her favorites, hand-blown and from Murano, Italy, hangs above the table.

Hemingway's Writing Studio

Hemingway's writing studio is on the second floor of an old carriage house. A catwalk originally connected this studio to the second-floor veranda off his bedroom in the main house. He would wake up, shuffle over, and write his 700 words per day (said the tour guide). The catwalk and the cookhouse it ran over blew down in '48, so a stairway was built for tourists to peek in through the iron gate at the entrance. An early-morning writer, Hemingway would wind down in the early afternoon and head into town to visit with locals and hang out at the bar. More after the jump...

Below, his Royal typewriter, a Cuban cigar-maker's chair, and things he collected (note the blue glass cats), supposedly just like he left it, though I'm always suspicious of such claims.

I wish those white fans weren't in there. They look new and not like Papa's aesthetic. He would've used something like this, right?

Stairs leading down to a courtyard....

The other side of the staircase. It's shaped like an inverted V, and the studio entrance is at the top. The path below leads to the pool, which was the first residential model built in Key West. It cost $20,000 to build, and it's still the largest in town, at 65 feet long.