A Room with a View: Gustave Caillebotte’s Paintings

I dwell in Possibility – A fairer House than Prose – More numerous of Windows – Superior – for Doors – Emily Dickinson It’s been a long year of repeated lockdowns and painfully drawn-out hours, when the only escape is looking out the window — anything to gain a break from the day and stop…

Claude Monet – Pont de l’Europe, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877)

When Georges-Eugène Haussmann, also known as Baron Haussmann, was assigned by Napoleon III to do a makeover of Paris in the mid-19th century, he was met with fierce opposition by the public. The expropriations en masse, the demolitions of entire neighborhoods and the tearing down of the Medieval, insalubrious, narrow streets, disrupted the daily lives…

Paul Gauguin – Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (1888)

Three friends. Three beards. Three paintings. In August 1888, a sensitive, anxious, yet quite ambitious 20-year-old man set out to walk by foot the more than 500 km distance between Paris and Pont-Aven, in order to paint with French artist Paul Gauguin. His beautiful younger sister, 17-year-old Madeleine, accompanied him. His name was Émile Bernard…

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot – Lady in Blue (1874)

It was the autumn of 1909 when a curious Parisian crowd gathered at the Grand Palais to witness the unveiling of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s decades long, well-kept secret. Thirty-four years had passed since the great French landscape artist had died, and much had happened in the meantime. Impressionism had changed the face of the art…

Henri Matisse – The Conversation (1908 – 1912)

“I love you dearly, mademoiselle, but I shall always love painting more”, Henri Matisse reportedly told his future wife, Amélie Parayre, soon after they met. The warning was true and it came to define the couple’s four-decade long marriage. It’s hard to tell how much love there was between them or if pragmatism ruled them…

Fleury François Richard – Montaigne and Tasso (1821)

“We must become like the animals in order to be wise, and be blinded in order to be guided”, advised Michel de Montaigne in his Essays. The French philosopher wasn’t referring to a state based on primal instincts, but to the silencing of the mind, for an overthinking mind is more unreasonable than one lacking…