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...
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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
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
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...
Stephanie Brown
43. Summer afternoons
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...
Stephanie Brown
40. Winter 1888
Gauguin was ill and the weather was bad. The winter of 1887-88 was cold, grey, and damp in Paris. The weather changed only to get worse....
Stephanie Brown
39. Translations
Félix Fénéon, "Vitrines des marchands de tableaux," La Revue indépendante de littérature et d'art (6: 15, Janvier 1888), p. 170. Dig...
Stephanie Brown
36. Mr. Butterworth's Mine
Almaden Quicksilver County Park, Santa Clara County, CA, 2020 (personal photo) While we count down the hours til WPI's promised release...
Stephanie Brown
33. Transactions
Vincent moved to Paris late in February 1886, and by early April he had found a local restaurant where he could eat cheaply.
Stephanie Brown
31. Enter Vincent
In the middle of October 1886, while Gauguin was packing up his canvases and hitting friends up for train fare, Vincent van Gogh had moved..
Stephanie Brown
30. At the Pension
Bernard put up at the Pension Gloanec when he got to Pont-Aven, and Madame Gloanec seated him next to Gauguin...
Stephanie Brown
28. A new sort of party in Pont-Aven
"This week," wrote the Pont-Aven correspondent for L'Union Agricole et Maritime on Sunday, August 1, 1886, "this week, we attended...
Stephanie Brown
25. On the expertise of Frenchmen in the tropics
Faithful readers may recall that a few months ago experts at the Getty Center in Los Angeles changed their minds about the attribution...
Stephanie Brown
20. "Tall, dark, rather handsome"
It may seem that there is nothing new under the sun. And then there's a portrait that hasn't been seen before...
Stephanie Brown
17. Introducing Pont-Aven
By 1879, a train ran once a day from Paris to Finistère, Land's End, at the eastern edge of Brittany...
Stephanie Brown
Welcome: Start Here.
This blog is a mystery, a travelogue across time and place, and a memoir about life and art, museums and research.
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