The arts and crafts of France. Meet the skilled craftsmen in Dordogne who are keeping the tradition of handmade pastels alive and make them the same way as when they supplied artists including Degas.

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first high-profile artists to promote the use of pastel in the 16^th Century. The art form flourished in the eighteenth century, again in the late nineteenth century and and has remained popular ever since.

Pastels Girault in Dordogne, founded in 1780, is the oldest handmade pastel manufacturer in the world still active today. The renowned French artist Maurice Quentin de la Tour, who worked primarily in the Rococo style during the 18^th century was an early customer. Edgar Degas used Girault sticks to create a tapestry of colour, as did his friend, American artist Mary Cassatt. Today, the company has a global following which numbers some of the best pastel artists in the world.

Pastels can be applied with a loose powder and in pencil form, but most often, directly with a colour stick, the speciality of Pastels Girault.

The arts and crafts of France – the pastel makers

I met the current owners Karine and Stéphane Loiseau, the 9^th generation of the artisanal firm at their company premises in Montignac-Lascaux. Karine, her husband and their two daughters moved their life from Paris to Montignac to take on the business in 2016 and continue the family tradition. Karine says “my great, great uncle bought the company in 1927 and my uncle moved the company to Dordogne in 1998, close to the Lascaux caves.” You can’t help but think of the fact that it’s here where artists created paintings using a form of pastel in the famous caves some 50,000 years ago.

Stéphane spent four years mastering the craft, learning the traditional skills which have been passed down through the generations. Now he teaches others the methods perfected over almost 250 years.

Pastels Girault manufactures around 150,000 sticks per year. They are all handmade in the workshop using ancestral secrets and original manufacturing methods. This includes the unique recipes for the different colours documented by Karine’s great, great uncle. Everything is a closely guarded secret.

Making pastels the traditional way

The first production stage involves weighing and mixing white clay, water and pigments sourced from the UK, France, and Germany. Some 300 different colours are produced, unique to Pastels Girault. Mixing a single colour at a time, the mixture is pressed into a canvas vessel to remove the excess water. It is then worked by hand to form a specific texture, a key step that takes years of experience. The paste is pressed into a 150-year-old extruder machine, a fascinating piece of kit that churns out long sticks which are cut to size – 63mm x 9mm. The number of the colour and the logo are stamped by hand onto each stick before they are air dried at room temperature for around three weeks.

The end result and quality of the pastels is exceptional, neither too hard nor too soft. The medium is favoured by many artists because it allows a spontaneous approach when it’s drawn on textured paper and dries instantly ensuring there is no change in colour. Girault pastel sticks have a slightly firmer consistency most, with very smooth and dense results when applied to paper, and such is the variation of the pastels tones, you do not need to mix the colours as you do with paint.

Awarded an EPV (Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant) label, which recognizes dedication to excellence and the preservation of French artisanal heritage, Pastel Girault hold workshops for artists each year. ‘We consider every pastel stick as a work of art in itself,’ says Karine.

Discover the full range of Pastel Girault products at their online store, www.pastelsgirault.com  or visit their shop in Montignac-Lascaux and, from 1 April each year, see their latest exhibition showcasing artworks signed by seasoned pastellists.

Jeremy Flint is an award-winning professional photographer and writer specialising in travel, landscape and location photography.

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If you were to ask who the most famous, highly paid artist of the 19^th century was in France, the names Ingres, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne and Van Gogh would most likely be cited by most people. And they’d all be wrong. It was a female animal portraitist, Rosa Bonheur who held the no. 1 position. However, she fell into complete oblivion in the 20^th century. Christina Mackenzie explores Rosa Bonheur’s extraordinary story – and how her art is being found by a new audience.

Artist Rosa Bonheur

Rosa Bonheur’s resuscitation as an artist over the past five years is entirely due to Katherine Brault and her family, who have single-handedly put the forgotten painter firmly back in the limelight. They didn’t set out to do so, but Brault, who had not heard of the artist previously, stumbled across Bonheur’s former home, the Château de By, whilst house-hunting in the Seine-et-Marne department. Returning Bonheur to her deserved place amongst the 19^th century’s greatest artists has become her life’s work.

The Château de By sits upstream from Paris atop the banks of the river Seine in the small town of Thomery. Thanks to Brault and her daughters, the château is now not only the Brault family home and the Rosa Bonheur museum, but also a very nice tea-room and guesthouse.

Brault, nominated as one of the 100 Women of Culture 2022, is a native of Fontainebleau, some seven kilometres west of Thomery. In 2014, after working in communications, gastronomy, and coaching visual artists, Brault decided to return to her hometown in the wake of a divorce and establish “a cosy, multi-functional guest-house in a large 18th century house.” No such house was on the market, so an estate agent suggested she encompass the 19^th century and visit the Château de By which had been on the market with all its contents for 10 years.

“It was way too expensive for me: €3.5 million! My budget was €1.5 million,” Brault laughs. But the estate agent told her the sale price was “widely negotiable” and then left her alone to wander around the property for three hours. Despite the dust and cobwebs she fell in love with it. In the artist’s studio, she recalls finding herself “in front of the large portrait of Rosa Bonheur and having the impression she was laughing at me, as if to say ‘Ha! Here you are at last!’”

The studio was almost exactly as it was in 1899 when Bonheur died. The château’s two owners, brothers, only came for a few weekends and holidays to undertake repairs and do a bit of maintenance. The house had cost them their marriages and vast sums of money. They were so delighted that Brault was interested that they reduced the price by €1 million!

Brault struggled for three years seeking subsidies, bank loans and partners for the rest of the money. Eventually she was able to buy everything except the items exhibited in the house. She paid rent for them to the two brothers for three years until an arrangement was reached with the Seine-et-Marne department who bought them for €400,000.

Rosa Bonheur Museum

The museum opened on June 1, 2018.

Brault’s hard work and tenacity resulted in her wining funding from the Loto du Patrimoine, a project managed by French journalist Stéphane Bern. On 20 Sept. 2019, President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte (wearing trousers in honour of Bonheur’s special dispensation necessary in the 19^th century to allow her to wear them in public instead of a dress!), accompanied by Bern, came to the château with a cheque for €500,000. The award enabled Brault to repair parts of the roof, the facade of Bonheur’s studio, various beams, the dovecote on the roof and the winter garden whose structure was designed by none other than Gustave Eiffel!

Meanwhile the attics full of notebooks, sketches, animal skins and spiders are slowly revealing their secrets. Amongst the most significant was a large canvas rolled up in the dust which turned out to be the first version of Bonheur’s most famous work “The Horse Fair”. The very large painting hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York while a smaller version is held by the National Gallery in London.

Marie-Rosalie Bonheur was born on 16 March 1822, in Bordeaux to Sophie Dublan de Lahet (known as Marquis) and Raymond Bonheur, an artist. The eldest and most talented of four siblings who all became artists (Auguste and Juliette, painters, and Isidore, a sculptor), she was taught by her father. But when she was 10, he joined the Saint-Simoniens movement (a sort of utopian socialism, a movement which influenced Karl Marx), leaving his family penniless. Sophie died of exhaustion in 1833 aged just 36. She was buried in the paupers’ grave in Montmartre cemetery. Her death had a considerable influence on the life of her daughter, whom she affectionately called Rosa.

Bonheur was convinced animals have a soul. She studied animal anatomy by attending cattle fairs and visiting slaughterhouses. But her presence amongst cattle drovers and butchers led to much ribaldry and vulgarity so she asked for a special permit to wear trousers. The French law forbidding women from wearing trousers was only lifted in 2013, even if nobody had abided by it for years! Brault has not found “a single pair of trousers” amongst Bonheur’s things in the Château, but has found countless dresses and skirts.

Chateau de By

Bonheur was able to live very comfortably from her earnings as an artist. She bought the Château de By, which borders Fontainebleau forest, with the proceeds from just one sale: 40,000 francs (€80,000) for “The Horse Fair” which sold again during her lifetime for 208,000 francs the equivalent today of €416,000!

Bonheur turned the Chateau into quite the zoo, keeping a wide range of animals from sheep and eagles to a couple of lions and a parrot. When the animals died, Bonheur had them stuffed and mounted so they stayed with her on the walls from where they still glassily stare down at visitors!

Another of Bonheur’s precious possessions still in the Château is an outfit gifted to her by Buffalo Bill who spent six months in Paris in 1889 with his Wild West show at the World Fair. Bonheur wanted to meet him so he could tell her how to train the two Mustang horses she’d been given by a wealthy American, and to introduce her to his bisons. She spoke no English, so an interpreter was found – Anna Klumpke, a 33-year-old American portraitist who lived in Paris. Following their meeting, the two women kept in touch and in 1898 at the age of 76, Bonheur agreed to let Klumpke paint her portrait. Klumpke temporarily moved to the château to work on the portrait and ended up also writing Bonheur’s memoirs.

Bonheur died May 25, 1899. Klumpke inherited everything and left Bonheur’s studio as it was. Even the cigarette butts are still there!

The Brault family are restoring the Château de By in such a way that were Rosa Bonheur to return she would find her paints, paintbrushes, and apron almost exactly where she left them 124 years ago.

You can book a guided tour of the Museum Rosa Bonheur at: www.chateau-rosa-bonheur.fr

Christina McKenzie is a Franco-British journalist who writes in both English and French. Married to a Frenchman, she settled 30 years ago near Fontainebleau.

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Today, smiles are seen as an indication of friendliness, happiness, or affection. However, for most of recorded art history, artists’ representations of the wide smile were frowned upon. Those grinning in paintings were branded as peasants, imbeciles, or drunks. Smiles were certainly found in scenes of ordinary European life, but many of those subjects fit the bill. Proper ladies and gentleman kept their lips buttoned.

In 18^th-century France, those wealthy enough to pose for a portrait remained tight-lipped. Women with alabaster complexions were painted as emotionless, gauzily draped mythological ideals. Theatrical body gestures were de rigueur, but facial reactions were downplayed.

The scandal of a smile

Then came Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun who aimed to warm those chilly countenances. Born in Paris in 1755, Elisabeth was a precocious painter from an early age, drawing on any available surface, from her notebooks to the walls of her convent school. Her father, a portraitist himself, focused Elisabeth’s talent to the easel, and when he died, the teenager was earning enough from portrait painting to support her small family.

At 20, Elisabeth Vigée married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, a painter and an art dealer who provided her with a successful entrée into the Paris art world. Once established as a member of the upper crust of Parisian society, she earned the favour of the Royal Court at Versailles and became the official artist of Queen Marie-Antoinette, who commissioned over 30 portraits.

Vigée Le Brun remained a bit of a bohemian eccentric within Paris society and was regarded as a nouveau riche upstart. However, with the Queen’s help, she was accepted into the prestigious Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, a very rare achievement for a female painter of the time. During its 150-year-long history, the Académie only welcomed four women as full members: Marie-Thérèse Reboul was admitted in 1757; Anne Vallayer-Coster was admitted in 1770; Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was admitted in 1783 along with Adélaïde Labille-Guiard.

In 1787, Vigée Le Brun caused a small scandal when her Self-Portrait with Daughter Julie was displayed at that year’s Salon, which revealed her smiling and ever-so slightly opened mouth. The Paris Salon, the biennial art exhibition held at the Louvre Palace, was known for setting standards of French, and therefore European, taste. Her small smirk was seen as a violation of conventional painting and sculpting traditions stemming from antiquity.

By smiling on canvas, her unseemly innovation was at odds with the neo-classical conventions of the late 18^th-century, which favoured gravity and reserve. A critic of the time called her smile, “An affectation which artists, art-lovers and persons of taste have been united in condemning, and which finds no precedent among the Ancients.”

The Mémoires Secrets, a gossipy tabloid of the time, went on to say, “this affectation is particularly out of place in a mother.” Vigée Le Brun thought the opposite, and continued to paint in her open and welcoming style; her secret smiles became her signature.

A French revolution in painting

Royal marquises and comtesses showed their smiles on Vigée Le Brun’s canvases, but in portraits of Vigée Le Brun’s patron, Marie Antoinette remained closed mouthed. An earlier 1783 painting of Marie Antoinette drew anger from the officials of the Academie  for reasons other than the smile. Vigée Le Brun had repainted the Queen in an unconventional white muslin chemise. A radical departure from what was expected of a queen, the portrait was decried as a depiction of the Marie-Antoinette in her underwear. The portrait was hastily withdrawn and replaced with a similar portrait by Vigée Le Brun of the Queen, wearing more conventional attire

Vigée Le Brun wasn’t the only person of influence who favoured smiling. In 1760, Voltaire, the prodigious writer and enlightened thinker, described what he called the ‘smile of the soul’, saying that the face of a beautiful individual would lack grace if they smiled with their mouths closed. The smile of the soul was found on the faces of the heroines on the pages of the best-selling novels of the Enlightenment-era. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and Rousseau’s Julie from La Nouvelle Heloise, beamed beatifically from their deathbeds. Fiction prized the smile as a symbol of inward and outward beauty. The Parisian elite, brought to tears by these novels, slowly began to approve of smiling.

By 1789, in the months leading up to the French Revolution, her position as an artist to the Queen and her court caused Vigée Le Brun to flee France making her an ‘enemy of the Nation’. The French Revolutionary government would later force her husband to divorce Elisabeth in order to retain their property and the contents of her studio.

During her exile, she traveled to the royal courts of Europe, where she continued to paint the coy smiles of the noblewomen of Russia, Austria and Italy, where in Naples she painted the visiting Emma Hart, who would become Lady Hamilton and the future mistress of Lord Nelson.

The decorative smile championed in the days leading to the French Revolution may have been an emblem of a fairer and happier society in the making. The smile was perhaps more democratic – an antidote to the glum facial fixity associated with academic art. It wasn’t to last. Under the paranoid New Regime, laughing and smiling, were banned in public meetings.

Vigée Le Brun spent 12 years in exile, and on her return to France, she continued to rebel against the popular tradition of sombre faces in portraiture, painting her gently smiling subjects well into the 1800s.

The smile didn’t make a comeback until the late 19^th century, when advances in photography made toothy, white smiles normal in portraits.

Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a radical and key painter of the 18th-century and perhaps, for a while, she taught France how to smile.

Hazel Smith is a freelance writer from Toronto.

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The Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval is one of the most extraordinary buildings in France. A palace built from pebbles by a postman – an act of determination, self-belief and of art, a monument to man’s ingenuity says Janine Marsh.

Palais Ideale

Passing through a modern ticket office building on an unassuming street in a tiny town in a rather hidden part of southern France, I came face to face with a dream.

Hauterives in the Drôme department, Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes, is hardly known outside of France. There are around 2000 inhabitants, served by a friendly bar and a couple of restaurants, a cosy bakery, a few shops, B&Bs and a camp site. It’s a typically French country town – tranquil, sleepy even for the most part. But Hauterives has an extraordinary secret. Drive through the town and you may miss it. Swerve to a side street near the boulangerie, a stone’s throw from the charming Le Relais hotel (which had you passed you would be wondering why a little town like this needed one) and you will discover something quite extraordinary.

A palace, built by hand from pebbles collected by a postman as he performed his delivery rounds.

A man with a mission

Ferdinand Cheval was a man with a mission, though it didn’t come to him until quite late in life.

Born in 1836 in Drôme, unlike many of his contemporaries in this poor area of France, he went to school and learned to read and write. In 1830 the postal collection and delivery system began in France and when he left school, Cheval became a postman. He had a long round which he covered on foot – between 32-40km each day (20-25 miles). As he walked, he daydreamed. He had never travelled the world, but he “saw” it through illustrated magazines that were popular in those days. In the early 1870s postcards became popular and Cheval would deliver them, looking at the extraordinary views from around the world – the pyramids of Egypt, the Swiss Alps, Mosques and temples – images of far-flung lands he could never hope to see for himself, and they simply fuelled his dream even more.

One day in 1879, Cheval tripped on a stone while walking on his rounds. He popped it in his pocket and took it home. He later said that the thought occurred to him then “if nature is the sculptor, I will be the architect.” The pebble kickstarted a dream, a wild and improbable longing – he decided to build his own palace, a fairy tale palace.

Soon he began filling his pockets with pebbles as he walked his long rounds delivering post. It became an obsession. He took to wheeling a wooden barrow on his rounds so that he could collect larger stones and more of them.

At the age of 43, he started his project.

He had no building experience. He had never studied architecture. But for the next 33 years he toiled and learned as he went. Mixing limestone to bind the stones, sometimes using pieces of iron to give strength to the structure. His nephew who lived in Marseille sent seashells that he collected – great bags of shells posted to the postman. Cheval worked them into his designs. He made many drawings and though most have been lost, some do remain and are shown in the museum next to the palace.

He worked at night by candlelight after he’d finished a day’s work.

And he built a palace.

33 years, 10,000 days, 93,000 hours – one man. Through rain, snow and the summer heat nothing halted his ambition, nothing stopped his progress. “I wanted to prove what the will can do” he later said.

A palace like no other

It is an astounding example of naïve art architecture. It features giants and animals, fountains and strange figures, some parts look almost Gothic cathedral, some parts resemble Aztec temples. It is a mishmash of styles but wholly unique. I climbed the different levels, followed dark passages inside where every inch is covered with sculptures, art and messages. I walked around it several times, each time noticing something I hadn’t seen before.

The local people thought him crazy, but nothing deterred him. News of the postman’s palace of pebbles spread and in 1905 he opened it to the public. A few newspapers wrote about him and his “ideale palais”. By 1907 visitors from the USA were making the journey to Hauterives to see for their own eyes what one man could achieve with his bare hands and several tons of pebbles. I wondered how a man with such an obsession fared in his personal life. “He married twice” said our guide, “widowed in 1873, his second wife was wealthy and helped to fund his project.”

Artists and celebrities visited and were amazed by the sight of the emerging architecture – naïve for sure, but astonishing and unique. Picasso created a dozen drawings as a tribute and Salvador Dali was inspired to create a pavilion in homage.

Cheval became famous in his lifetime. Now he – always looking proud – and his Ideal Palace featured on the postcards he so loved. When someone took photos of his creation to sell as postcards without his permission, he took out a court case and created the first copyright in France.

Cheval never lived in the palace. When he started his masterpiece, he lived a few minutes’ walk away, but eventually he built a house next door which had a balcony overlooking the palace.

26 metres long (85 feet) by 12 metres wide (40 feet), it was the culmination of a wild dream, an obsession and a lifetime’s work by night.

The Palais Ideale of Postman Cheval is one of the wonders of France.

With the job completed in 1912, Cheval, now aged 76, started building his own tomb in the local churchyard. He finished it aged 83, and died the year after in 1924. Built in the same style as his palace, and towering over the cemetery, it is a fitting resting place for this most remarkable artist.

How to get there

By car is easiest but if you go by public transport, the nearest train stations are in Romans-sur-Isère or Saint Vallier-sur-Rhône. From both stations taxi services are available as well as buses which take around 30 minutes. Find more details of how to visit, opening times etc: www.facteurcheval.com

Discover the charms of the Drôme: Ladrometourisme.com/en
Discover Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes: auvergnerhonealpes.tourism.com

Janine Marsh is the author of  several internationally best-selling books about France. Her latest book How to be French – a celebration of the French lifestyle and art de vivre, is out now – a look at the French way of life.

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It was in June of 1840, the month of roses, when Pierre-Joseph Redouté died suddenly at the age of eighty. His coffin was laid to rest in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris with a wreath of roses and lilies, the two flowers he loved the most. Although he never met a flower he didn’t like, the rose and the lily were the perfect epitaph by which he was remembered. He is still considered the greatest botanical painter of all time.

Who was Pierre-Joseph Redouté?

Pierre-Joseph Redouté was born in 1759 in the village of St. Hubert, in the province of Liége a part of the Ardennes that then belonged to the Duchy of Luxembourg and now belongs to Belgium. He was the grandson, son and brother of painters. So it was almost inevitable that he would follow in their footsteps. Redouté left home at the age of thirteen. He spent the next ten years living a precarious life painting interior decorations, portraits and religious commissions. He travelled across Flanders and the Low Countries studying the works of the master Flemish and Dutch botanical painters Jan van Huysum, Rachel Ruysch and Jan Davidsz de Heem.

At the age of 23, Redouté moved to Paris where he spent the rest of his life. It was at the end of the Age of Enlightenment and the city was a mecca for science and culture. When Redouté wasn’t working at the theatre where his brother was a stage designer, he frequently visited the Jardin du Roi, now the Jardin des Plantes. He would draw for hours on end. It was there that he caught the eye of Charles-Louis L’Héritier de Brutelle. A French aristocrat, he was also the Superintendent of Parisian Waters and Forests, a biologist and plant collector.  L’Héritier encouraged Redouté to produce botanical studies. He offered free access to his botanical library and plant collection. He also became Redouté’s instructor, teaching him to dissect flowers and portray their specific characteristics precisely.

The royal garden collection

L’​Héritier was so impressed with his new student he commissioned him to illustrate two books on botany. As a result Redouté created more than 50 drawings. They are included in L’Heritier’s Stirpes Novae, New Plants, and Sertum Anglicum, An English Garland. L’Héritier generously recommended Redouté to Gérard van Spaendonck, the miniature and flower painter to King Louis XVI. Together with other artists, van Spaendonck produced drawings and paintings for the famous Vélins du Roi, Royal Collection of Paintings on Vellum, archival drawings and paintings of all the specimens brought to the Jardins du Roi. Nearly 7,000 gouaches and watercolours on vellum representing flowers, plants and animals.

Spaendonck recruited Redouté as a pupil and staff painter, and he subsequently contributed over 500 paintings to the ongoing Vélins project. Spaendonck taught him a special watercolour technique that produced flower paintings on vellum with an unusually bright translucency. By his own account, his student’s work was finer than his own.

An international influence

In 1787 Redouté and L’Héritier left France to study plants at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, near London for a year. While there, he collaborated with the greatest botanists of the day. He also participated in nearly 50 publications depicting both the familiar flowers of the French court and rare plants from places as distant as Japan, America, South Africa, and Australia. Redouté produced over 2,100 published plates depicting over 1,800 different species. Many of them had never been rendered before.

Marie-Antoinette was a fan

L’Héritier also introduced Redouté to members of the court at Versailles. This led to Marie Antoinette becoming one of his patrons. She appointed him her personal court painter. Even though encounters with the royal family were few, one biography cites a famous incidence when Redouté was asked to visit the royal family in prison during the Revolution. They wanted him to capture the beautiful moment of a rare cactus in bloom. With skill and savvy, Redouté survived the political turbulence of the French Revolution and the ensuing Reign of Terror.

During the 1790s, Redouté gained international recognition as one of the most popular flower painters in the world. His renderings of plants remain as fresh now as when he first painted them. He was a celebrity and had a fashionable clientele. He even had a private apartment in the Louvre as well as a country residence outside of Paris. His salary was in excess of 18,000 francs a year – a huge sum in those days.

He perfected the colour stipple engraving technique, which he had learned during his stay in London. He first applied it in his illustrations for L’Héritier’s publication of Augustin Pyramus de Candolle’s work, Plantes Grasses Succulents. It was Redouté’s first major botanical work featuring only colour-printed plates.

Josephine Bonaparte was a fan too!

In 1798 the Empress Josephine Bonaparte, the first wife of Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte, became his patron. She appointed him to paint the flowers of her garden at Château de Malmaison. She was resolute in filling her gardens with the finest specimens of nature as well as having their essence preserved on paper.

That same year Redouté published 500 plates of exquisite lilies in his book Liliacées. In 1819 his paintings were exhibited at the Louvre. In 1824 his most famous work, Les Roses, was published. It was said that each delivery of the finished colour copperplates was received with a storm of enthusiasm. It was these two works which distinguished Redouté as a true artist and not merely an illustrator. Between 1802 and 1816, eight folio volumes were printed, each dedicated to Empress Josephine.

A master artist

After Joséphine’s death, Redouté was appointed a Master of Draughtsmanship for the National Museum of Natural History. He became a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1825. Between 1827 and 1833 Choices of Beautiful Flowers and Fruits, was printed. By then Redouté had become a master engraver of such singularity that he was able to apply all of his colours at once on one single copper plate. Folio editions of this masterwork were published each year for seven following years. In 1834 he was awarded the prestigious Order of Leopold of Belgium for his artistic contributions.

Eva Mannering, who wrote the introduction to the 1954 publication of Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s Roses remarked, “The conditions which made possible a work like this exist no longer, nor do the roses themselves as they are illustrated in this book… They are reminders of a more leisurely age, pleasing and delighting us in their colourful abundance. For by giving us one rose, he has given us at the same time, all the roses of all summer days.”

Sue Aran lives in the Gers department of southwest France where she runs French Country Adventures which provides private, personally-guided, small-group food & wine adventures into Gascony, the Pays Basque, Tarn and beyond…

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The mere mention of the word ‘Paris’ can conjure a vision of rows of handsome Hausmann stone buildings – some of them sober and classically proportioned, others more florid and exuberant, but all reflecting the aesthetics of the mid-nineteenth century. Being accustomed to this vision, what we generally do not imagine as being classically ‘Parisian’ is the expression of a design movement that emerged several decades later in the 1890s and flowered for a quarter century: Art Nouveau.

La Belle Epoque

While that generally peaceful and prosperous era in France is known as La Belle Époque, it was also a time beset by rampant industrialisation, urbanisation and commercialisation. The uniformity of cheap and nasty mass production was seen to threaten long traditions of individual craftsmanship that used and expressed the qualities of natural materials. Out of this concern, Art Nouveau arose in Belgium and  France – influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement – as a wide-ranging aesthetic, encompassing architecture, art, furniture, homewares, jewellery and more. It was essentially a rejection of industrial modernity and took inspiration from the materials and forms of the natural world.

What we envision as being classic inner city Paris was mostly created in a frenzy of carefully planned destruction and reconstruction led by Baron Hausmann from 1853 to 1870. Of course, Art Nouveau did not even exist in that era, so obviously could have no expression. So most of what we see of Art Nouveau in Paris today is essentially grafted onto existing Hausmann structures. The most obvious public manifestations of Art Nouveau – apart from some Metro entrances – are doorways and architectural details.

Doorway to Art Nouveau

A typical example is pictured (top), being the doorway of 29 Avenue Rapp, 7^th arrondisement. The base material is timber, being only lightly varnished to express its true colour, texture and grain. The flowing lines of hand carving suggest natural movement, greatly accentuated in the glass panes by the waving of the intertwined fronds and rushes fashioned from finely hand wrought metal. The metal hinges resemble sea creatures, while the door handles suggest salamanders. It’s all about uncontaminated nature and natural movement, far removed from mass industrial production. It was indeed beautiful, but it was not to last very long.

As the Bolshevik revoltionary, Leon Trotsky, acutely observed, ‘War is the locomotive of history.’ As the first massive conflict of the industrial age, the cataclysm of The Great War (1914-1918) smashed through European civilisation in a demonic roar of coal-fired engines, flames, friction and heat. In scale, intensity and breadth, the victims of the war were beyond reckoning. In parts of northern France, where industrialised violence and butchery reigned over four years, in addition to the appalling human cost was the destruction of sublime medieval art, including some of the intricate stained glass windows of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Reims.

The Great War not only devastated the artistic culture of the past, but also of the then-present. In that sense, the Art Nouveau movement in Europe was also a casualty of the war. In the relative peace of the 1890s and the immediate pre-war years, the bucolic whimsy of Art Nouveau with its gently flowing lines could create a convincing world of artisanal contentment existing alongside but separate from the crude industrial world. Trotsky’s locomotive of war demolished such faery-like romantic notions: revolutionary industrialism was triumphant.

During the inter-war era of the 1920s and 1930s, it was a complete repudiation of Art Nouveau that seized the imagination of the world in the shape of Art Deco. In shorthand, we could say that whatever Art Nouveau was, then Art Deco was not: it defiantly turned the aesthetic upside down. In place of flowing organic tendrils were the jagged metalic lines of Deco; where one-of-a kind arts and crafts pieces made from raw and natural materials were favoured by Nouveau, they were superseded by factory-made products produced by new synthetic materials, such as bakelite. Art Deco was urban and urgent: it was of the ‘now.’ Art Nouveau was provincial and naïve: its dreamy day was done.

Well, almost but not yet completely. In the mid-1960s, all those Nouveau-inspired flowing forms made a comeback of sorts with the emergence of Psychedelia. Leaving behind the muted autumnal colours of Nouveau, Psychedelia went beyond the highly saturated and exaggerated colours of the French Fauves (or ‘wild beasts’) and embraced even wilder contemporary ‘DayGlo’ colours. But the influence of Nouveau was unmistakable in the free-flowing line work of pop graphic art, especially as applied to ephemeral posters for pop concerts, modern art exhibitions and (ahem) ‘happenings.’

Back in present-day Paris, there is really no single focal point where you find all the Art Nouveau gems. While the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in the Louvre complex has a fascinating collection of artefacts, the best advice (as always) in Paris is to stay on foot and keep your eyes wide open – and not on your phone. At street level, the joy of Parisian Art Nouveau discovery awaits you.

By Brad Allan, writer and wine tasting host in Melbourne, Australia and frequent visitor to France…

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Artist Sonia Delauney moved to Paris from the Ukraine in the early 1900s where her art was hugely influential…

When we think of the defining features of twenty-first century life, the increasing dominance of digitised technologies must be right near the top. These ‘soft’ technologies are virtually(!) non-physical and are often said to exist in what we airily describe as ‘the cloud.’ Unsurprisingly, the course of contemporary art has been strongly influenced by digitisation, too. Sometimes that influence is forward-looking and original. But at other times, digital art treatments can be backward-looking and laughably kitschy. For instance, in projecting digital images of nineteenth century Impressionist paintings onto vast blank walls, destroying any sense of painterly texture, true colour and scale.

What is modern art?

The term ‘modern’ as applied to art (and anything else) is entirely subjective. What’s happening now is undeniably ‘modern’ simply because we all happen to be here now. But what defined being ‘modern’ in 1937 was a whole lot more analogue than today. It was a world of pulsating physical energy, friction and wires, often measured by circular dials with quivering needles.

Back in 1937 ‘the cloud’ was somewhere that you actually ventured. Strapped inside a roaring, dangerous, bone-shaking, winged metal box: a primitive aeroplane by today’s standards. But considering that powered flight had existed for barely 25 years, a pioneering single-winged, propellor-driven plane that could fly at 550 km per hour (340 mph) – such as a ‘new’ Hawker Hurricane – was a wonder of the modern world.

Sonia Delaunay’s ‘modern’ art

Among the artists of the 1930s who expressed the dynamism of the modern analogue world was Sonia Delaunay. Born into a Jewish Ukrainian family in Odessa in 1885, she was sent to live with her mother’s more affluent family in St Petersburg as a youngster. Sonia’s imagination was stimulated by visits to the great art galleries of Europe. She became intensely curious and forward-looking. Moving to Paris, she was obsessed with modern movements in art and design. She achieved fame with her own individual painting style and theatrical costume designs. Her work explored the interplay of wedges and curves of flat bright colours. Her inspiration came from  contemporary Cubism and Geometric Abstraction.

In 1937, she was commissioned to create a series of murals for the Palais de L’Air at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, hosted in Paris. One of her remarkable and large murals – 8.5 m x 3 m or 28 ft x 10 ft – was titled ‘Tableau de Board’ (or ‘Dashboard’). This ‘modern’ mural still looks utterly striking 85 years after its creation. In the Geometric Abstract manner, it embodies Delaunay’s characteristic use of intense flat colour and curves (rather than recognisable objects) to generate feelings and meanings in the viewer.

Curves, colours and cockpits

But for this purposeful commission, Delaunay adds something new to her art. Some definite and instantly recognisable ‘real world’ elements, including dials and gauges set into an aircraft instrument panel or dashboard. The strong horizon line, with more muted colours below, delineates the inside of the machine from the outside world. Yet the continuation of the curves connects the machine and its environment. The central circular elements suggest both the control wheel inside the plane’s cockpit and the spinning propeller just beyond it. To the top left and right of the mural we can see daytime on the right and approaching night in the left. All within the curved and layered colours of the sky. Viewed as a whole, it is a wonderfully unified modern visual concept. And without a ‘cloud’ in sight.

Sonia Delaunay narrowly avoided the lethal deportations of French Jews during the German occupation of the 1940s. She continued to be a successful artist after the war. In the latter part of her life, she was feted with a retrospective of her works at the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Centre. She was the first female artist to be celebrated with a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre Museum. She became an Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1975. After a spectacular career, Sonia Delaunay died, aged 97, in Paris in 1979.

By Brad Allan, writer and wine tasting host in Melbourne, Australia and frequent visitor to France…

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In 2015, artist Paul Rafferty began a project to find the locations of Sir Winston Churchill’s painting locations for a book. His focus was the South of France, where he lives, though his discoveries went beyond this region. It became a voyage of discovery which took him to many of the most iconic locations of Provence and the Cote d’Azur and resulted in a gorgeous coffee table book, filled with photos and anecdotes.

An artist inspired by an artist

Long ago, in 2004, I came across a watercolour in an antique bookshop in Los Angeles. It was signed ‘Winston Churchill’. I took a photograph and sent it to David Coombs who is the authority on Churchill’s paintings. He informed me it was not by Sir Winston as he never painted in watercolour. Thus began my interest in Churchill’s paintings and a bond with David. I began to locate places where Churchill painted…

Finding these locations through a combination of Google Earth, cartes postales anciennes and knowledge of the region turned out to be a huge challenge. It was much more of an undertaking than I had ever imagined. Even before this, I had found myself painting some of Churchill’s locations, though many of the views were not obvious. The painting at Villa Sylvia in Cap Ferrat titled “The Little Harbour, St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat” painted in 1921, is a good example. This pretty little cove lies just below the exquisite Villa Rothschild and I had painted this exact view before, though I had taken in a wider field of view. Churchill chose a more cropped view and focused on the villa. It was the jetty tower with its distinctive gazebo on top that I eventually recognised, one of many Eureka moments. This led me to find another painting of the garden of Villa Sylvia featuring an old pergola. The painting of the magnificent villa Churchill visited with Sir John Lavery was a new discovery, no one knew he’d ever been there.

Location, location, location

Finding the locations was just one element of my search. Getting into these places, if they were private, was a whole other task and no less daunting. I had to find out whom owned the villa or chateau. Try to contact the owner and ask permission to visit. These are very private, wealthy people with large secluded properties. Thankfully, the admiration for Churchill and documenting history won them over, and I was kindly granted access.

Living the good life on the French Riviera

There is no doubt that Churchill lived a grand life on the French Riviera. Not for him the life of  poor, starving artist. His travels were replete with valets, Scotland Yard Detective bodyguards, secretaries and all manner of equipment to write and paint. Churchill was a Francophile and loved his trips to the Cote d’Azur, coming often and staying as long as was permissible. Though there was one occasion he ventured there alone. Winston, arriving at the glorious Chateau de l’Horizon and low on funds, tried the hazardous experiment of foregoing his valet. Greeted by his hostess, Maxine Elliott, he said “You have no idea how easy it is to travel without a servant. I came away from London alone and it was quite simple.” Maxine replied “Winston, how brave of you.”

Winston was enraptured by the French Riviera, the sun, the colours and abundant subject matter were irresistible to him and he longed to capture them on canvas. The Pol Roger, fine food and Casinos were also to be indulged in.

I visited Cassis, Lourmarin, Pont-du-Gard, Cap de Antibes and many other locations on my journey to follow in his footsteps. Discovering where Churchill painted the red rocks between Theoule and St Raphael was a special find, It’s really not that easy to find a specific rock among a coastline full of red rocks!

Painting the south of France

Churchill painted a possible 600 paintings in total during his lifetime, at least 150 of them were of the South of France. He only painted one canvas during the Second World War, in Marrakech, which he gifted to President Roosevelt.

Considering his relatively limited time and output as a painter, one has to judge his work with this in mind. To me, he excelled as an amateur painter. The more I looked at the canvases and the locations, the more I came to respect him as an artist. He painted large canvases on site, in the elements. He would finish them off at his studio in Chartwell because of his busy schedule. If it was possible to return to the same location to continue or complete a canvas, he would.

Churchill painted fast, a one and a half hour session could see the canvas covered. He was bold,  attacked the canvas and did not shy away from a subject, colour or challenge. He adored colour and squeezed all the colours of the rainbow onto his palette. Some of his works tended to have somewhat garish colouring. His wife Clementine would encourage him to “cool your palette a la Nicholson” (Sir William Nicholson, friend and artist mentor).

Lady Churchill would also try to grab a canvas off his easel when she thought it was done, much to the chagrin of Winston. He had a tendency to overwork a canvas and kill the freshness he’d captured on location.

Following in Churchill’s paint brush strokes

I live in Mougins where Churchill visited the Guinness family in the 1930’s and painted the chapel next door, Notre Dame de Vie. In 1960 Pablo Picasso bought the house having also visited the Guinness family and falling in love with the Mas. This would be Picasso’s home and studio until his death in 1973.

Pont-du-Gard is remarkably carpeted by Churchill’s brush, glowing as it does in the last light. In fact this was a common thread with the canvases as they tended to be painted in the afternoon light, probably after his lunch.

I used laminated reproductions around the size of a large post card to find the exact spot on location. This was imperative for me as I wished to line all the elements up with the canvas. Many times it would be identical, quite incredible considering the development along the coast.

One of the highlights of the book occurred during my research when I managed to discover a small photograph at Chartwell, showing Churchill in a dark robe at Chateau de l’Horizon holding a painting of St Paul de Vence. This proved to reverse a decision made on national tv, the BBC’s Fake or Fortune programme, and the painting is today in the Churchill collection.

Churchill was a fine painter

Even though Churchill considered these paintings ‘my daubs’, he was very serious and studious about his work. I came to the conclusion that for him, this was a passion above all others and a way of escape from his busy life, and a means of relaxation that no other hobby could offer. He would be absorbed while painting, time would pass quickly and his mind was focused only on his subject. Despite his love of good food and wine, he even had to be badgered and coaxed from his easel to go to lunch or dinner. A true artist…

Paul Rafferty’s book Winston Churchill: Painting on the French Riviera, published by Unicorn is available from Amazon and all good book shops. The author is hoping to produce a documentary of the project and has plans to produce a companion book of Churchills paintings of Great Britain, the Stately Homes and landscape he so loved.

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In the 1880s, French artist Georges Seurat was using tiny points of colour to create paintings that conveyed a sense of calmness, including slowly flowing waters. Unsurprisingly, Seurat’s technique was called ‘Pointillism.’

But let’s revert to the present day and we’ll work backwards. If you take a close look at a colour picture in a newspaper, you’ll see that the image is composed of tiny dots or points of colour. The impression of full and natural colour is created by combinations of only four dots of different colours: cyan (a shade of blue), magenta (a shade of red), yellow and black. The printing combination is commonly known as CMYK – the ‘K’ being for ‘Key’ or black.

Picture this: joining the dots

While printing relies upon overlaying dots of four coloured inks to achieve its effects, Seurat’s dots were composed of oil paints in an infinite colour range.

Seurat was not trying to capture a photographic style of realism. He was more interested in conveying an impression or the mood of a scene. As Seurat discovered, his technique of Pointillism was ideal for capturing scenes with a sense of slowness or stillness.

Bathers at Asnieres

One of Seurat’s masterpieces is called Bathers at Asnieres (displayed in the National Gallery, London). It depicts a sunny day with ordinary working people relaxing in the waters and on the banks of the River Seine. The attractive natural scene is just outside of Paris. But in the distance through the heat haze, you can see a smudge of the city’s industrial smoke rising into the sky. In all likelihood, it’s the Paris of smoky factories where these ordinary people usually lived and worked just about every day of their lives.

But on this special sunny day, these working people are taking it easy. Their moments of precious relaxation captured for us forever in Seurat’s tiny points of colour on canvas.

You can see several of Seurat’s paintings at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Written by Brad Allan, writer and wine tasting host in Melbourne, Australia and frequent visitor to France.

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Every now and again, when chatting to French friends they’ll drop in a sentence that contains the words “the 7^th Art” or maybe “the 9^th Art” and recently there was talk about the “10^th Art”. You, like me, might be wondering what on earth they’re going on about…

Well in France, the arts are classified. The 7^th Art refers to cinema. The 9^th Art refers to comics. And the 10^th Art to video games! So what are the others and why are the arts classified?

It’s all down to a German philosopher by the name of Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel (170-1831). It’s a pretty complex topic and he wrote heaps of notes the subject but what it boils down to is that art is defined as being a uniquely human activity. That the product of this activity or the idea that one has of it, deliberately addresses the senses, the emotions and the intellect.

His thesis was that art is unique to man. It distinguishes him in nature, and that this activity has no clearly defined functions. And while he was writing lecture notes for his students, the idea of classifying arts was born, though the origins of categorising art go back to Greek antiquity and the nine muses. They were the daughters of Zeus and their arts were: eloquence and epic poetry, history, lyrical and choral poetry, music, tragedy, rhetoric, dance and choral singing, comedy and astronomy.

After Hegel’s death, his notes were collected in a book, “Aesthetics”, which explains his vision of the link between art and the world. His classifications of the 5 major arts caught on in France but since then its been an evolving list and five more arts have been added.

The French Arts

1st Art: Architecture

2nd Art: Sculpture

3rd Art: Visual arts – painting and drawing

4th Art: Music

5th Art: Literature and poetry, writing in general

6th Art: Performing Arts, dance, theatre, mime and circus

7th Art: Cinema

8th Art: Media arts – radio, television, photography

9th Art: Comics. They’re a respected art form in  France which boasts the world-famous La Cité Internationale de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image in Angouleme, and hosts an annual huge comic festival. (Read more about it in what to see and do in Angouleme).

10th Art: Video games or digital art forms…

So next time you hear the expression the 7^th Art, you’ll be able to drop in a few comments on the other arts too!

More on the arts in France

History of the Louvre – the world’s most visited museum
La Piscine Museum, Roubaix – an art deco wonder with a world class collection
If you like your art weird and wonderful – check out the Fondation du Doute in Blois, Loire Valley
Carrieres de Lumieres, Provence

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