PASTELS DU MONDE AU FÉMININ, FRANCE 2022

"To behold Beauty dignifies your life, it heals you and calls you out beyond the smallness of your own self-limitation to experience new horizons. To experience beauty is to have your life enlarged."  
John O'Donohue 

In Paris I encountered beauty everywhere I looked; the food, fashion and art were always presented with an attention and appreciation to beauty. Douglas and I had an amazing trip in France, it was a life changing for me in many ways. Over the next few months, I want to share with you the beauty we enjoyed in art, food and fashion.

Paris is the city of Art and Museums, and we were determined to visit our top three choices, the Musée d'Orsay, L'Orangerie, and the Musée Marmottan Monet. The Musée d'Orsay, is an architectural delight! I was astounded at how they took an old train station and built a museum around the structure  to incorporate much of the original character. The light coming into the first floor area danced over the sculptural collection and invited you to wander t through this area like an outdoor garden. This could have been a full day of exploration, however we had our intentions set on the fifth floor, the home of the Impressionists and Post-impressionist collections.

Where we found room after room curated beautiful, each telling the story of the artists and the evolution of Impressionism.  Works by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro, Manet, and few lesser known artists, Caillebotte, Guillaumin. The flow of rooms leads the viewer into the evolution of Post-Impressionist, with works by Seurat, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Photo Credit: Fay Lomax Cook

Vincent Van Gogh, L'Italienne

This moment, captured by Fay who was intrigued by my intensity said I had to stop and take a photo. "I was taken by the beauty of one red head looking at another" she said.  Every day we are stopped by simple moments of beauty and hopefully pause long enough to take it in. 

The story of L'Italienne: This woman is without doubt Agostina Segatori (1843-1910), a former model of Corot, Gérôme and Manet with whom Van Gogh seems to have had a brief love affair a few months before this portrait was painted. During his time in Paris, between March 1886 and February 1888, he was initiated into the scientific color-theories developed by the Neo-impressionists. He was also profoundly interested in Japanese etchings, and in this portrait, Van Gogh offers a very personal synthesis of these two influences.
Several elements are reminiscent of Japanese prints: the asymmetrical border, the stylisation of the character in a portrait with neither shadows nor perspective, the monochrome background... But instead of the refined touch of Eastern aesthetics Van Gogh employs an energetic treatment, which results in an impression of almost primitive might.
The Neo-impressionists juxtaposed complementary colors in order to achieve intensity. Here, Van Gogh did likewise, associating reds with greens and blues with oranges but instead of the pointillist brush-stroke characteristic of Seurat and Signac, he uses a criss-cross of overlapping nervous hatching.
From: Musée d'Orsay website

The colors are violent, expressive, revealing Van Gogh
to be a precursor of Fauvism.