Louviers Museum

The region of Normandy celebrates the Impressionist era every three years, and every time a different theme is selected.  This year the theme is portraiture, and the municipal museum in Louviers got us started today with a good introduction to the era's major players in the genre of portraiture.

I've always been fascinated with self-portraits.  Here is Renoir capturing himself in profile.  I am drawn to the little bit of paint that makes the eyes so special in this one

Here is a name that was new to me: Louise Abbema, and her "Woman with Umbrella".  I have recently taken up photography and one lesson I'm learning from art such as this is the power of the empty space.  Notice that the entirety of the woman herself is in mostly the lower diagonal half of the canvas.

But when you see it hanging on the wall and are allowed to get up close and personal, her face is stunning:

This Pissarro piece was one of the last we saw, and I lingered over it for a while, fascinated by the almost pointillist style of applying color that the impressionists used to give, well, impressions more than detail to their work.

And here we get to look over Pissarro's shoulder, busy at work, captured by Armand Gaullamin:

Portraiture can, of course, be 3-D, as illustrated by theses busts of Rodin (left) and Manet (right).














I mentioned that Louviers was for many years a textile center.  The museum houses a permanent exhibit honoring that history, including among other exhibits, a Jacquard loom.  I had to mention that because every semester I emphasize to my students the importance of the Jacquard loom to the history of electronic computing, because Jacquard invented the punched card to control his loom:

Tomorrow is Fête Nationale, known to many Americans as Bastille Day, the French rough equivalent of Independence Day in the U.S.A.  We are going to visit friends nearby.  I will honor the occasion by taking a day off from the blog and will be back on Friday.