Near Napoléon’s tomb in the Dôme des Invalides, in one of the side niches, is a monument to another remarkable man, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), a French military engineer and adviser to King Louis XIV. Unlike most military officers in the seventeenth century, Vauban did not belong to Read More …
After my glorious military career of one year, nine months and thirteen days as a draftee in the American Army (including fifty-one weeks in Vietnam), I am not exactly what you would call a military buff. In fact I never thought I would voluntarily set foot in an army museum, Read More …
On the top floor of one wing of Les Invalides in Paris there is an unusual museum showing twenty-eight large relief-map models that were made starting in the seventeen century, showing fortifications and fortified towns at a scale of 1:600. The earliest of these was made on orders of King Read More …
The sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) lived and worked in the Hôtel Biron in Paris for the last decade of his life. (The word Hôtel is used here in the old sense, meaning mansion.) In his will, he left the building and most of his sculptures to the French state, for Read More …
Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) was a French artist who spent most of his career drawing, painting and sculpting nude women. Visitors to the Maillol Museum in Paris are greeted by a photo of a seventeen-year-old girl with no clothes but lots of hair. The text reads: “Dina Vierny (1919-2009), creator of Read More …
“Foujita, painter in the crazy years” was the title of an exhibition in the Maillol Museum in Paris in the summer of 2018. Although I am not a huge fan of Foujita’s artworks, I do find him interesting as a denizen of Montparnasse in the 1920s. I think the first Read More …
In the spring of 2019, the Musée Maillol in Paris exhibited artworks from the Emil Bührle Collection from Switzerland, featuring paintings (and a few sculptures) by Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Goth, Modigliani and Picasso. I went twice, once to see the collection on my own and once Read More …
This footbridge across the Seine in Paris connects the Garden of the Tuileries on the Right Bank (1st arrondissement) with the Faubourg Saint-Germain on the Left Bank (7th arrondissement), near the Orsay Museum. When I was in Paris in the 1960s there was a nondescript temporary steel footbridge at this Read More …
Rue Monttessuy is a short street in the 7th arrondissement which has no particular claim to fame other than a view of the Eiffel Tower. The street was named after a nineteenth-century diplomat, Gustave de Monttessuy (1809-1881), who owned several pieces of property in this neighborhood. In case you would Read More …
This is one of those quintessential Paris photos that everyone wants to take sooner or later: The Eiffel Tower from the Alexandre III Bridge. The sculpture in the foreground was made by Georges Récipon (1860-1920) and is supposed to represent a nymph, though she is rather more muscular than nymphs Read More …