Website tip: This Parisian street scene by Victor Gabriel Gilbert is part of February 1st Sotheby's auction. I wish I remembered more often to check auction house and gallery websites—they are such valuable resource for details of everyday life. Here, for instance, notice the bellows and the charcoal brazier on which the pots sit. Genre pictures can also raise questions about everyday life to follow up: What exactly is the woman on the right doing? And what is the green-stuff on the shelf under the Café au Lait sign?
Picturing a World
Gilbert’s Market Day
February 3, 2018
Besides the great central food market, Les Halles, there were, of course, lots of neighborhood street markets throughout Paris in the 19th C. While poking around after finding yesterday’s painting by Béraud of Les Halles, I came across this picture by Victor-Gabriel Gilbert, Read More
Parisian posters
November 7, 2017
On Sunday, I attended the opening lecture for a new exhibition at the Clark Art Institute, The Impressionist Line: From Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec, which examines works drawn or printed on paper. The show runs through January 1, 2018, with several talks and activities Read More
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Telling, little details
October 30, 2017
When Jeanette goes into her first bakery in France, she notices the white cards with prices written in a Continental hand. Those price cards and their style of numbering had stuck in my mind ever since my student days in France, so it’s not surprising that I smiled this morning when I saw Read More
Marie-François Firmin-Girard
July 5, 2017
Blog post alert:> Thanks to a post at Line and Colors for introducing me to Marie-François Firmin-Girard. I love finding pictures that I might have used for Where the Light Falls had I come upon them in time. Read More
Old London
May 6, 2017
Blog alert: Every morning, I check the blog Spitalfields Life. Today’s post, A Walk in Long Forgotten London is one of several devoted to Walter Thornbury’s Old & New London, an 1873 compilation of engravings of the London that was already disappearing when it was published. Read More
Votes for Women in Cincinnati
November 6, 2014
Of course, this should have been posted on Monday with an exhortation to vote (I hope you did). If you find the results of Tuesday's elections depressing, remember our foremothers worked and worked and kept working despite.
The Library of Congress captions this photograph, "Miss Louise Hall with brush and Miss Susan Fitzgerald assisting bill posting in Cincinnati." Read More
The Library of Congress captions this photograph, "Miss Louise Hall with brush and Miss Susan Fitzgerald assisting bill posting in Cincinnati." Read More
Bristol, Virginia/Tennessee
November 3, 2013
I’m headed today for Bristol, where the Virginia/Tennessee state line runs right down a main street. Tomorrow at 10 A.M., I’ll be reading at the public library.
Readers: Doesn’t this picture invite story-telling? Read More
Readers: Doesn’t this picture invite story-telling? Read More
Edward's apartment
October 21, 2013
When he returns to Paris from Rome, Edward sublets an apartment on the Right Bank in a new, comfortable district of straight boulevards, harmonious architecture, and no haunting history. Some critics claim that painters of urban modernity in the last quarter of the 19th C depicted alienation and emptiness. They would call your attention to how far Caillebotte’s solitary viewer is removed from the street. But to me, standing as he is at ease above a boulevard lined with trees and handsome buildings, the man suggests Edward: alone perhaps, yet content to contemplate the gifts of civilization and peace in contrast to the horrors of war.
For a street-level view by Caillebotte of the same sort of neighborhood (and solitary man), click here. Read More
For a street-level view by Caillebotte of the same sort of neighborhood (and solitary man), click here. Read More