Dali House

The Auberge de la Bonne Franquette at the corner of Rue des Saules and Rue Saint Rustique was called Aux Billards en Bois in the 1890s, when Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Monet and Zola were among the clientele. The owners still take pride in the fact that Van Gogh painted its garden in “La Guinguette” in 1886.

At the Montmartre Museum at 12 Rue Cortot there are art exhibits, musical performances and many valuable documents, but no visitor can ignore the fact that this 17th-house was the home at different times of Renoir, Raoul Dufy, Erik Satie and Emile Bernard, and then a café that provided lodgings for Maurice Utrillo and his mum.

The main house is the “maison de Rosimond”, so named for its one-time owner, Rose de Rosimond, a stage actress in Molière’s troupe who died onstage in mid-scene, just as Molière had done. Not much to look at out front, but it has a lovely garden in the back.

The Brasserie des Martyrs, once situated at 75 Rue des Martyrs, was the place to be seen in the days of Courbet, Baudelaire, Proudhon and Gauthier, and remained so for the generations that followed.

The great Renoir – whose “Seated Female Nude”, also known as “After the Bath”, is seen here – was among those who had their own designated tables in the huge, three-storey restaurant. Monet and Pissarro would hover around his, trying to muster the courage to speak to him. See the rest.

Christophe Petyt is a likely customer for Dafen, that art-copying colony in China.

He’s been collecting fake paintings for ages and his L’Art du Faux Collection, established in 1992, is in the Guinness records book as the world’s biggest.

He doesn’t seem embarrassed in the least. His new website, complete with enormous photographs of him, suggesting a tendency to narcissim (though he does hold charity auctions), boasts of more than 2,500 paintings “of the most prestigious artists”, though Guinness credits him with 3,500.

The latter number, Christophe’s site seems to say, applies to his L’Art du Faux Foundation, the output of 82 artists around the world – “only the best artists can become members”. See the rest.

I think the news media may have got a little carried away with a scientific study of Claude Monet’s paintings of the British Houses of Parliament, the the preliminary results of which were published last month.

So far, environmental scientists are merely hoping that the pictures might be read as a pollution chart. I’m not really sure why they want to do this, but I suppose having a big name like Monet at the top of your research proposal makes it a hell of a lot easier to get funding.

His series of depictions of the scene on the Thames between 1899 and 1901 have always enthralled because of the scintillating impressionistic style, which helped open the door to the relative fireworks of pointillism.

But now researchers Jacob Baker and John Thornes at the University of Birmingham are wondering if the paintings were in fact faithful depictions of the Victorian weather. See the rest.

This is a companion piece to my Google Earth travelogue about the great English impressionist. The GE post is here.

“The painter of light”, “the great pyrotechnist”, one of the finest landscape artists in English history, if not the best, Joseph Mallord William Turner produced more than 20,000 paintings and drawings in his lifetime, and his frequent rambles across Europe happen to make him a perfect subject for Google Earth.

JMW Turner was celebrated in his own time, and deluged with commissions, but he was also the Jackson Pollock of his day, scathingly reviled for “hurling soapsuds and whitewash” at canvases with a mop – even Queen Victoria thought him mad – and his foul temper and reclusiveness lost him many friends. Just five foot four inches tall, he was hobbit-like in size, but he was the artistic giant of the early 19th century. See the rest.

A century after the death of the “father of modern art”, the world has calculated his proper value.

This is another of my Google Earth extravagances (see the earlier ones documented in Dorseyland, but certainly tracking the great Paul Cézanne all over France was pretty damned interesting. See the rest.