Tuesday 20241022
After breakfast we set out for the Arc de Triomphe, and this time we walked down the Champs Elysee because it is one of those things you do in Paris. The Louis Vitton store on the Champs is built to resemble a giant metal suitcase, and on the opposite side of the street there are a number of galleries of shops you enter from the street. This brought us down to the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais. The Grand Palais was closed, and there was no exhibition going on there, but the Petit Palais had people lining up to go in. It is free of charge for the most part, but there was an exhibition of work by a Swedish wildlife painter that required a ticket. We skipped it, but we did very much enjoy an exhibition of orthodox icons from Greece and the Balkans. Then we went upstairs where there was a very eclectic collection of both paintings and statues. My eye may be getting better, since I saw one painting from across the room and felt it might by a Monet, and indeed it was.
We walked to an outside terrace where Cheryl had her lunch, then went back in where it turned out we had seen pretty much everything. We did see a lot of students sketching here, which made sense since this might be the only free museum in Paris, and art students are not known for having a lot of spare cash.
After leaving, we walked over the Alexander III Bridge, which is pretty spectacular. Alexander III was a Russian Tsar who concluded an alliance between Russia and France in 1892, and this was a gift from Russia. Tsar Nicholas II laid the foundation stone in 1896. This is the most ornate bridge in Paris, and worth a few minutes to visit. Then we resumed our walk on the Champs Elysee, which took us to Place de la Concorde. Then we crossed to the other side of the Champs Elysee and walked in a park across from the American Embassy, and finally got the Metro to go back to our apartment.
In the evening we set out for the Eiffel Tower, where we had tickets. I was told it was worth going at night when everything is lit up, and it was pretty awesome to look at. But we ran into a problem. I thought I had purchased tickets to take the elevator up to the second floor, but it turned out we had tickets good for a 20 minute stair climb, and that was definitely not happening. I probably missed this when booking. But we turned around and went back to the apartment. And I started to feel a little roughness in my throat.
Wednesday 20241023
We had a tour of the Musee d’Orsay today, so after breakfast we caught the Metro and went down. This was a small group tour, and there were 14 of us. Again the guide was very knowledgeable, plus Cheryl had watched a video before we went down, so we had a base of knowledge. We started with the officially approved paintings. There is a French Academy that decided what was proper painting, and this resulted in what was called academisme. Everything had to follow the rules to be OK with the Academy. Artists like Edouard Manet wanted to see some change, but Manet wanted to work from the inside instead of leading a revolt. But painters like Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and others went ahead and rebelled, setting up their own exhibitions of the “rejected” works.
The Musee is in an old train station, and has that feel from the inside. We entered on level 0 where we saw the academisme works, before going up to Level 5 where we saw, in order, the Pre-Impressionists, the Impressionists, and the Post-Impressionists. Manet is one of the best Pre-Impressionist painters, and we saw some of his more famous works. One is of a prostitute who is lying on a bed naked and staring back at you. And another is of a picnic where both men are fully dressed and both women naked. For the Impressionists, Monet is the most famous, and the movement takes its name from his 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise. Impressionism was about getting out of the studio and into nature, and instead of trying to show something literally, it aimed to provide the impression of the thing. A big emphasis was on light, and the quality of the light in different circumstances. Monet, for instance, did a series of paintings of the Cathedral in Rouen, where each one was at a different time of day and different light conditions.
For the Post-Impressionists the leading figure is surely Vincent Van Gogh, who moved to France for the last 4 years of his life before committing suicide. There was a room devoted to his work, and we had seen some of those paintings before when the Van Gogh exhibition came to Detroit.
All in all we saw a pretty good bit of what was on display. They do change the paintings displayed on Mondays when the Musee is closed, so every time you come it will be slightly different, but we were well satisfied with what we toured today. And after finishing we returned to the apartment. After dinner I went to bed early to try and shake this cold.
Thursday 20241024
We started by heading down to the Trocadero after breakfast. This is a garden spot near to the Eiffel Tower, but a major part of the garden was closed for maintenance of some kind. This was too bad because those gardens offer some of the best views of the Eiffel Tower. There is the Palais de Chaillot there with a courtyard between the two wings where Hitler was photographed in 1940 after conquering France. And it was the temporary headquarters for NATO before a permanent location was found.
Then we went walking through the 16th arrondissement which seems to be the wealthier part of town. Our objective this time was the Musee Marmottan Monet. We started with the Imperial artists, i.e. during the time of Napoleon. Then we found a lovely room full of the paintings of Berthe Morisot. She is called the “Forgotten Impressionist”, no doubt because she was a woman. But we loved her paintings. She appears in a number of Impressionist paintings as a subject because they all used each other as models. She was married to Eugene Manet, brother of the artist Edouard Manet. Then we went through an exhibition of Trompe l’Oeil, which was interesting but not really what we came for. But on the other side we found the Monet, which was what we came for. Finally we took the Metro back, and by the time we sat down in the apartment it was already 4pm. It had been a very full day in our last week in France. I’m not tired of Paris, but I am starting to look forward to being home again.
Friday 20241025
While we were having breakfast and reading e-mails we got one from Great Value Vacations that offered a great deal on a guided trip to Spain and Portugal for 9 nights, so we jumped on it and will be going in March 2025. But putting that on the credit card made the bank contact me to verify that it was legitimate. It is a good point, I could have had my card stolen. But I reassured them it was legitimate
Then we went to Musee l’Orangerie, which has the famous installation of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. We had pre-purchased tickets, and a good thing too. When we got there we saw a line of people and a sign that predicted a one-hour wait. But with our time-stamped tickets we went right in. We started with the Water Lilies, which are in two oval rooms as large panels that cover the walls.It is really meant to be meditative, so we spent some time doing that. Then we went to an exhibition of paintings collected by the art dealer Paul Guillaume (1891-1934). He had paintings from a number of artists such as Matisse and Picasso, but there were a lot of paintings from Amedeo Modigliani, Maurice Utrillo, and Chaim Soutine. We also saw a collection from Heinz Berggruen which included a lot of Picasso’s works. And finally, there was a set of three circular paintings by Amelie Bertrand called Hyper Nuit, which were very modern. All in all a very good visit, and then we returned to the apartment and got Lebanese food for dinner. We need to be up early tomorrow for our trip to the Loire Valley.
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