More Paris

I had two major objectives in Paris today - to take my former PhD student Avigail out to dinner with her husband, to celebrate - rather belatedly, but still 2022! - her PhD; and to see the Rosa Bonheur exhibition - both were accomplished!

I loved these enraptured small school children.

Paris itself was very bleak and cold - but still lovely, with spectacular animated decorated windows in Galeries Lafayette and Au Printemps;

and high class bling in Dior.

Then the Kehinde Wiley show that I missed by a few weeks in Venice was here  - perhaps a better setting?

My favorite picture in the Bonheur show, perhaps, was one of her by one of  her brothers - clearly she was a force to be reckoned with at a young age.

She was terrific at sheep - Scottish blackfaces, here -

didn't really seem to pay all that attention to plants and habitat - though there's a bit of lichen on this silver birch ...

and I loved this Gramsci-like Chat Sauvage.

Then two treats as I wandered around more generally: these Caillebotte sunflowers, which are a new acquisition;

and a Monet I swear I've never seen before.

I kept thinking ... back when I went to the Courtauld to do an MA, I'd been accepted to work on C19th French art, my real love at the time.  How different things might have been if Anita Brookner hadn't refused to teach a course with only two people in it ... which meant that I had, with some disappointment, to do English Romantic Art instead.  Which of course has been ... well, not quite what I've ended up doing, but I learned a lot about Constable and Turner.  Every time I come to Paris, let alone to the Musée d'Orsay, it's a head-shaking exercise in what might have been.