Stephanie Brown
64. Ripped from the headlines
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Maternité II, 1899. Oil on burlap. 37¼ x 24 in (94.7 x 61 cm). A decade after Meier de Haan painted Marie Henry...
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Stephanie Brown
63. Tour de Marie Henry
The Beach at Kerfany. Postcard, about 1900. We are taking the Marie Henry tour of Finistère; it’s challenging because we have to devise...
Stephanie Brown
62. Where we come from, where we are going
One of the books near my desk here in verdant North Carolina--where I come from, and where we have been these last few weeks--is a family...
Stephanie Brown
61. 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 Brown
60. A+
Caill, Antony, La Question des vacances scolaires, 1891. The French school calendar includes four two-week vacations. There’s the...
Stephanie Brown
59. In the dining room
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...
Stephanie Brown
58. Around the buvette
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...
Stephanie Brown
57. Signatures and attributions
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....
Stephanie Brown
56. Looking closely
Paul Gauguin, Café at Arles, 1888, oil on canvas, Pushkin Museum, Moscow In the Morozov Collection exhibition at the Fondation Louis...
Stephanie Brown
55. Décalage
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...
Stephanie Brown
54. Meijer de Haan
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...
Stephanie Brown
53. Two men walk into a bar
A friend opened a bakery-café about 10 years ago in my hometown. She leased a downtown store front, bought a second hand professional...
Stephanie Brown
52. Léa
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,...
Stephanie Brown
51. On the beach road
A ferry crossing the Laita River at Le Pouldu, early 1900s, Archives Finistère The chemin des Grands Sables still runs along the coast;...
Stephanie Brown
50. Scale
One evening in early spring when we were living in Châteauneuf de Grasse, in the Alpes-Maritimes department of France, my husband and I...
Stephanie Brown
49. In Le Pouldu
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...
Stephanie Brown
48. What the archives tell us
Marie Henry was born in the provincial town of Moëlan, in the region of Pont-Aven, the administrative district of Quimperlé, in the...
Stephanie Brown
47. La rentrée
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...
Stephanie Brown
46. Les vacances
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...
Stephanie Brown
45. En route
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...