In August 2013 I went on another guided walking tour (in French) that I found listed in the back pages of the now-defunct weekly magazine Pariscope. This was mainly a tour of the Île Saint-Louis, but since that island has no Métro stations, we met at the kiosk by the 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 …
From the outside, the Hannover Opera House still (or again) looks much the same as it did when it first opened as the Royal Court Theatre (Königliches Hoftheater) on September 1, 1852. In July 1943 the inside of the theater was destroyed fire bombs in one of the many bombing Read More …
The Calvet Museum is one of several worthwhile art museums in Avignon. Its main building is this mansion on Rue Joseph Vernet, which was built from 1741 to 1754 for a family called Villeneuve-Martignan. The museum has been located here since 1835. The street was named after the eighteenth-century painter Read More …
Nogent-sur-Seine (pronunciation here) is a quiet town of nearly 6000 people, located 93 km southeast of Paris. In the nineteenth century, four generations of sculptors lived in Nogent-sur-Seine. They were Marius Ramus (1805-1888), Paul Dubois (1829-1905), Alfred Boucher (1850-1934) and finally Camille Claudel (1864-1943). In 2017 the world’s first Camille Read More …