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...

Caill, Antony, La Question des vacances scolaires, 1891. The French school calendar includes four two-week vacations. There’s the...

At Marie Henry’s inn, the painters were not content with borrowing pots and pans for their still lifes: as the days grew shorter, Gauguin...

Theo 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...

To 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....

Paul Gauguin, Café at Arles, 1888, oil on canvas, Pushkin Museum, Moscow In the Morozov Collection exhibition at the Fondation Louis...

The 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...

Nothing 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...

A friend opened a bakery-café about 10 years ago in my hometown. She leased a downtown store front, bought a second hand professional...

We 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,...

A ferry crossing the Laita River at Le Pouldu, early 1900s, Archives Finistère The chemin des Grands Sables still runs along the coast;...

One evening in early spring when we were living in Châteauneuf de Grasse, in the Alpes-Maritimes department of France, my husband and I...

Le 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...

Marie Henry was born in the provincial town of Moëlan, in the region of Pont-Aven, the administrative district of Quimperlé, in the...

I check the website of the Musée de Pont-Aven every month or so, hoping that a miracle will have transpired and their archives will...

In 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...

Vincent 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...

Longtime readers may recall that the Gauguin catalogue raisonné for the years 1888-1903 was promised for the end of December 2020. Our...

There'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...

We'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...