Impressionisme

We’ve been working our way towards Paris, and now we’re so close, I could practically touch it.  Can. Not. Wait.

We finished our châteaux tour yesterday with Fontainebleau, which was basically a country house for the French royal family and the king would go there to hunt.  It is ridiculously big and incredibly impressive on the inside.  Fontainebleau was also used more recently than some of the other châteaux we’ve seen, so there was more furniture and it was much more ornately decorated.  It was a precursor to the grandeur of Versailles.

I wish I would’ve had time to walk around the surrounding park, but we had to regroup and go to lunch. 

Fontainebleau

Napoleon I's Throne Room

After lunch, we headed to the little town of Barbizon to visit the Musée Départementale de l’École de Barbizon, Auberge Ganne to start our little tour focused on impressionism.  Auberge Ganne is a former inn that now serves as a little museum of the beginnings of impressionist art.  Many artists who kind of started the impressionism movement would go to Barbizon to paint in plein air (outside) and paint the Fontainebleau forest.  The museum was super small, but I loved it the fact that it wasn’t overwhelming.  There were paintings by artists like Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, but the number of paintings was limited because most of these artists’ work is in the Louvre or Musée D’Orsay in Paris.  It was cool, too, because there were little paintings and sketches on the walls from when the artists stayed in the inn.  These artists came before Monet and Renoir’s generation, and their color palette was a little darker, but I really liked their work.

Auberge Ganne

After Barbizon, we took our bus to Bougival to check into our hotel and eat dinner.  Our hotel is even called Villa des Impressionistes because this area is so well known for being frequented by impressionist artists.

Today we started at La Maison Fournaise in the town of Chatou.  La Maison is located on L’île des Impressionistes, a little island in the middle of the Seine.  La Maison Fournaise was a restaurant that Monet and Renoir and their peers were known to hang out in, and there are several impressionist paintings of it as well.  There’s a little museum on the island, but it doesn’t have any original paintings, just replicas, so I wasn’t super impressed.  There are originals by lesser known artists, and there was an exhibit about the evolution of paint and how industrialism led to paint that came in tubes, which facilitated the impressionists painting outside.  Superrr exciting.  I’m no art historian, so I was not that enthused about the museum.

Chateau d'Auvers sur Oise

This afternoon, we went to Château d’Auvers sur Oise which is now a museum dedicated to impressionism.  There’s no actual art inside, but it has exhibits devoted to the time period and the inspirations behind impressionist art.  It was basically preparation for when we visit the bigger museums in Paris with the real artwork.  Even though it was kind of a tedious museum, it was helpful for me since I always feel so ignorant when I look at art.  I now have some background for impressionist art, which might be some of my favorite.

Since this post was basically a game to see how many times I could use the word impressionist or any variation, I’m going to stop here, but I’ll have more impressionist related things to report on tomorrow before I’m in PARIS tomorrow night!

P.S.  Sorry for the barrage of posts.  We've had internet issues at the hotels, so I've been stockpiling entries.  Bisous!