Red Sky in the Morning...

Today I visited the Musée Marmottan in the leafy 16th Arrondisement, though I must confess that many of said leaves are already turning orange and brown – that’ll be the horse chesnuts! (Are these châtaigniers or marronniers in French, I wonder?)

The museum is an amalgamation of various impressive private collections of art of various periods and styles, contained in the former townhouse of its eponymous founder.

The substantial Monet collection is most popular amongst them, of course, as well as the work of many other Impressionists, including an entire room of Berthe Morrisot’s paintings, which was encouraging to see.

The current exhibition Monet et l’Abstraction is small but perfectly formed and a cosy place to spend a rainy afternoon. Given the usual IOS (Impressionist Overload Syndrome) which can quickly engulf the unsuspecting gallery-goer in Paris, it was refreshing to be able to savour the whole show, with plenty of benches on which to sit down and contemplate the work and buckets of water available for throwing over any flagging water-lily fanciers (actually, I made that bit up, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea in mid-summer).

I loved seeing Monet’s famous ‘Impression – Soleil levant’ (‘Impression – Sunrise’) from 1873 in a different light, paired with a gorgeous 1969 study in sunset reds by Mark Rothko. But the real revelation for me was seeing some canvasses from his later years, painted with beautiful loose and spare brushwork at his garden in Giverny, (which - yes - is still on my list of places to visit!). Did I mention that the colours were sublime?

By the way...

Recognise today’s Velo du jour? Notice it’s similarity to my Jardins des velos of August 8th? (And no, I haven’t run out of bikes – au contraire, they are wrestling for pole position like Velibes at a traffic-light on a train-strike day in Paris!)

A special thank you today to devoted blog-follower, researcher extraordinaire and Delphine’s Dad – merci beaucoup Dominique – for finding today’s Velo du jour amongst his archives, noticing the resemblance and tracking down the original source and photographer for me.

The original photo was taken by Bernard Meyer and appeared in the newspaper Dernières Nouvelles D’Alsace on Thursday August 22nd 2002, with the following caption: "Vu à proximité de la résidence universitaire de Neudorf. Le volubile liseron s'en donne à coeur joie en attendant que s'achèvent les vacances et que le propriétaire du vélo reprenne le chemin de la fac."

I guess the Cité isn’t the only place where bikes are parked up and forgotten about for the summer holidays!