You leave Montclair 216 miles behind to the east and arrive on a college campus to deposit your first born back from a visit home. Your husband and sons go to the football game but you aren’t keen on climbing hundreds of steps, and anyway it’s 38 degrees. You decide on the art museum, which has been recommended by a friend who teaches on campus, because the huge used bookstore she also recommended (which truthfully, is really of more interest), is six blocks away uphill and you are loathe to give up the on-campus parking space. Art, then.

The first floor feels old world and European. Oversized paintings in wide gilt frames, voluptuous women, Madonnas and fat angelic babies, scenes of destruction, rapture, brute justice, infinite grace. You are glad you came. Crowded, busy northeast New Jersey seems far away indeed. Everything feels far away, and you are glad. The holidays are coming and you are overwhelmed with too much work at work and at home. Far away feels good.

Then you go upstairs, and sidestep the modern gallery even though you know you should see the two Picassos and the Warhol and the Kearns and the Lichtenstein. But not now. Now you just want more far away and long ago, so you try the smaller wing where the paintings and artists are not quite as long ago, but old enough. Dead, at least, mostly.

You graze, gaze and then you stop short. A painting in a corner calls you and you don’t know why, but it’s insistent. What is it? From across the gallery, it’s just another pastoral scene, a muted brown-green-golden foreground, trees, rolling hill, people at leisure in old garb, and beyond, maybe a more populated area, though it’s hard to tell. You are drawn to it and you don’t know why. But you approach.

And because you are, despite this afternoon’s adventure, essentially a word person, before you look more closely at the painting, you do what you do in every art museum you’ve ever visited, much to your husband’s and children’s chagrin. You read the entire card posted on the wall next to the painting, the story of the artist and this work. The painting is titled “Sunburst.” The year is 1893.

By the end of the first line, you know precisely why this painting looks so familiar and why maybe you recognized it, or at least something about the style of the artist, and for a fleeting moment you whine to yourself that even here, you can’t get away from home.

Then a couple nearby, on their own trip through the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University, approaches. The woman asks, smiling, maybe hopeful, “Are you a George Inness fan too?”

Well, you say, you live near the Montclair Art Museum and…

“Oh you do, how lucky you are!” the woman says. Her smile broadens. Her companion smiles, and nods. She continues, “We’ve been there only once and really loved it and would love to go back.”

Then they tell you all about their love for Inness, and about how fortunate you are, and you stand up a little taller, and they go on about how MAM has one of the finest and most comprehensive collection of works by this great 19th-century landscape painter and Montclair resident. Actually they don’t say exactly that, they say, “he’s such a fabulous artist,” but you look him up later on the MAM website and this is what it says.

You nod and smile and at the moment wish you knew more about Inness other than that he’s intimately associated with your local art museum and you’ve seen his paintings there a few times. You take their picture and they say thanks and you take a picture of the Inness painting and instead of being annoyed that your sojourn among the old masters has been interrupted by reminders of the places you write about all the time, which reminds you of home and all the busyness that awaits you there, you are, instead, happy. And now you must find the Picasso and the Warhol and the Kearns and the Lichenstein.