Stephanie Brown61. Where do we come from? Where are we going?Paul Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? detail, 1897-98, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. On a December...
Stephanie Brown60. A+Caill, Antony, La Question des vacances scolaires, 1891. The French school calendar includes four two-week vacations. There’s the...
Stephanie Brown59. In the dining roomAt Marie Henry’s inn, the painters were not content with borrowing pots and pans for their still lifes: as the days grew shorter, Gauguin...
Stephanie Brown58. Around the buvetteTheo van Gogh to his brother Vincent, Paris, February 9, 1890: De Haan sent me a painting to dispatch to his brother. One can see that...
Stephanie Brown57. Signatures and attributionsTo greet the New Year we have a visual game to play that takes us from the typeface of Twitter to the painterly loops of Paul Gauguin....
Stephanie Brown56. Looking closelyPaul Gauguin, Café at Arles, 1888, oil on canvas, Pushkin Museum, Moscow In the Morozov Collection exhibition at the Fondation Louis...
Stephanie Brown55. DécalageThe French verb décaler means to move around in time and space. If you're posing for a photo and are out of frame, you décale yourself...
Stephanie Brown54. Meijer de HaanNothing that we know of Meijer de Haan’s life before 1888 suggests that he would book into an auberge run by a single mother on the...
Stephanie Brown53. Two men walk into a barA friend opened a bakery-café about 10 years ago in my hometown. She leased a downtown store front, bought a second hand professional...
Stephanie Brown52. LéaWe do know one thing that Marie Henry did while the Buvette de la Plage was under construction: she got pregnant. In May or June 1888,...
Stephanie Brown51. On the beach roadA ferry crossing the Laita River at Le Pouldu, early 1900s, Archives Finistère The chemin des Grands Sables still runs along the coast;...
Stephanie Brown50. ScaleOne evening in early spring when we were living in Châteauneuf de Grasse, in the Alpes-Maritimes department of France, my husband and I...
Stephanie Brown49. In Le PoulduLe Pouldu was where the roads came to an end. The Laita river bounded it on one side; the ocean on another. It was known for its sand...
Stephanie Brown48. What the archives tell usMarie Henry was born in the provincial town of Moëlan, in the region of Pont-Aven, the administrative district of Quimperlé, in the...
Stephanie Brown47. La rentréeI check the website of the Musée de Pont-Aven every month or so, hoping that a miracle will have transpired and their archives will...
Stephanie Brown46. Les vacancesIn the middle of July, in France, cities begin to empty. First a trickle, then a stream; by the middle of August, all but the tourists...
Stephanie Brown45. En routeVincent van Gogh, Le Train bleu, 1888, Musée Rodin Two men are on an overnight train to Paris at Christmas. They've both had a traumatic...
Stephanie Brown44. Missing yearsLongtime readers may recall that the Gauguin catalogue raisonné for the years 1888-1903 was promised for the end of December 2020. Our...
Stephanie Brown43. Summer afternoonsThere's a story that Zola used to walk the streets of Paris copying shop proprietors' names into his cahier. When your novels had as many...
Stephanie Brown42. Who tells your storyWe'll let Gauguin get on with it in Pont Aven and shift our attention today to a young woman in Amsterdam who, while Gauguin was making...