James and I went over to Muirhead Vaccination Clinic this morning to get our second and last Cholera prevention drink. After waiting the obligatory ten minutes to make sure that we did not have any adverse reaction we decided to go for a walk, and James suggested nearby Drumpellier Park. What a difference in temperature to our sunny and sweltering walk in Chantilly on Saturday! Here the weather is cloudy and much cooler, but it’s still summery and the park was filled with wild flowers and grasses. We extended our walk through the woods and circled back to the very nice visitor centre for a coffee.
Back home I started painting a watercolour of some flowers that I saw at the Hameau de la Reine at Versailles; I feel inspired by all the beautiful gardens that I saw in Paris and its environs. Still on a French theme, James and I made some madeleines. We baked them using a madeleine mould that we bought two years ago in Paris, in a big cookware shop that we wandered into in Les Halles. It’s the first time that we have used it but better late than never! The madeleines didn’t rise quite as much as they should have, probably because I didn’t chill the batter, but they tasted absolutely delicious and very lemony.
I have also been doing a bit of detective work. When we were having lunch at Au Clairon des Chasseurs in Montmartre last week, Ewan pointed out a striking mural painted on one of the walls inside. It consisted of a French military bugler, sitting in a relaxed manner on the edge of a table, dressed all in blue with a blue cap and white gaiters, backpack on his back. Ewan and the rest of us speculated about the origin of this mural; was it a copy of a well known painting? Did the soldier date from the 1st World War or earlier?
The bugler stuck in my mind and last night I browsed around the internet to try to find him, using reverse image search to no avail, and typing various descriptions of him, also unsuccessfully. Finally I turned to online community Reddit and uploaded the photo that I had taken of the mural, asking for help in identifying it. And when I woke up this morning I was delighted to have received a reply from a kindly person who had found the original photograph of the bugler, upon which a military artist called Alphonse de Neuville had based one of the characters in his painting “Eclaireurs d'avant-garde franchissant une rivière (Crimée)” which he exhibited in 1869. In the painting, the bugler is transposed from a table to the front of a boat crossing a river. This possibly dates the original photograph to the 1850s and I was very surprised that artists sometimes used photographs as resources as far back as the mid 19th century. In fact my investigation has raised many more questions in my mind about 19th century military art and I have thoroughly enjoyed it!
Back home I started painting a watercolour of some flowers that I saw at the Hameau de la Reine at Versailles; I feel inspired by all the beautiful gardens that I saw in Paris and its environs. Still on a French theme, James and I made some madeleines. We baked them using a madeleine mould that we bought two years ago in Paris, in a big cookware shop that we wandered into in Les Halles. It’s the first time that we have used it but better late than never! The madeleines didn’t rise quite as much as they should have, probably because I didn’t chill the batter, but they tasted absolutely delicious and very lemony.
I have also been doing a bit of detective work. When we were having lunch at Au Clairon des Chasseurs in Montmartre last week, Ewan pointed out a striking mural painted on one of the walls inside. It consisted of a French military bugler, sitting in a relaxed manner on the edge of a table, dressed all in blue with a blue cap and white gaiters, backpack on his back. Ewan and the rest of us speculated about the origin of this mural; was it a copy of a well known painting? Did the soldier date from the 1st World War or earlier?
The bugler stuck in my mind and last night I browsed around the internet to try to find him, using reverse image search to no avail, and typing various descriptions of him, also unsuccessfully. Finally I turned to online community Reddit and uploaded the photo that I had taken of the mural, asking for help in identifying it. And when I woke up this morning I was delighted to have received a reply from a kindly person who had found the original photograph of the bugler, upon which a military artist called Alphonse de Neuville had based one of the characters in his painting “Eclaireurs d'avant-garde franchissant une rivière (Crimée)” which he exhibited in 1869. In the painting, the bugler is transposed from a table to the front of a boat crossing a river. This possibly dates the original photograph to the 1850s and I was very surprised that artists sometimes used photographs as resources as far back as the mid 19th century. In fact my investigation has raised many more questions in my mind about 19th century military art and I have thoroughly enjoyed it!
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