There was a small crowd at the Marmottan as we waited for
the doors to open. We were going to the
Berthe Morisot show with another painter, before making our foray into the Bois
de Boulogne to paint. I hadn’t really
spent much time with Morisot’s work before this, and the depth of her
production was amazing. She was the wife of Manet’s brother, and a
mother, and in an age where women didn’t paint,
somehow found time to paint not
only rich portraits, but many beautiful landscapes. In
many of the painting of her daughter, I could see how much Morisot loved
her.
The Marmottan, if you haven’t been there, is the “Monet” museum. Lots of smaller (48 x 54” or thereabouts)
waterlilies hang, and other impressions of Giverney. In fact, the painting that gave “Impressionism”
its title hangs at the Marmottan.
There is also a fabulous collection of manuscript
illuminations in the museum. We spent a
bit of time examining these, as well as several walls of small portraits (12 x
12 inches) from the late 1700s. I figure
these were the last vestiges of some of the French aristocracy, as depicted by
Bouilly, from just before the Revolution.
We’ve have a week of back-to-back workshops.
On Tuesday we went to Giverney with three
painters.
Even though we’ve been there
before there are moments I sit in Monet’s gardens and get goosebumps.
I was
nearly overcome with emotion on Tuesday as I was walking by the lily pond,
checking on a watercolorist, and another painter.
I can almost feel Monet walking among us, or
at least on the collective minds of we five painters.
We had only one painter with us at Auvers-sur-Oise on Wednesday. We picked her up on Montmartre, and followed
the route by the flea markets at Clignancourt out to the country. It was a shorter foray than Giverney, only about
40 minutes. We went to the graves of
Vincent Van Gogh and his brother Theo – I feel different about him now that it
is known he did not commit suicide, but was killed accidentally by a local
boy. He had a great respect for life and
it always set oddly with me that he would have ended it all during this, the
most productive time in his career. This
new knowledge lends a more positive feeling to the trip, and I saw the church, the
fields, the river Oise with new eyes.
We painted a couple of pictures that day – and finished up
with a visit to the home of Dr. Gachet, the building now a museum. Gachet was a doctor caring for Vincent in
Auvers-sur-Oise. Gachet gave up his regular practice, grew a
homeopathic garden on the small estate willed him by his parents. He was a printmaker, and opened his home to
other artists as well as Van Gogh, including Pissarro, Renoir , Manet and
Cezanne.
We got home to find a lodger in our flat : a writer friend from Seattle has found his
way back to Paris. I slept happily that
night, with the sense that , like doctor Gachet, we were encouraging artists on
their artistic course.