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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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....

Félix Fénéon, "Vitrines des marchands de tableaux," La Revue indépendante de littérature et d'art (6: 15, Janvier 1888), p. 170. Dig...

Almaden Quicksilver County Park, Santa Clara County, CA, 2020 (personal photo) While we count down the hours til WPI's promised release...

Vincent moved to Paris late in February 1886, and by early April he had found a local restaurant where he could eat cheaply.

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..

Bernard put up at the Pension Gloanec when he got to Pont-Aven, and Madame Gloanec seated him next to Gauguin...

"This week," wrote the Pont-Aven correspondent for L'Union Agricole et Maritime on Sunday, August 1, 1886, "this week, we attended...

Faithful readers may recall that a few months ago experts at the Getty Center in Los Angeles changed their minds about the attribution...

It may seem that there is nothing new under the sun. And then there's a portrait that hasn't been seen before...

By 1879, a train ran once a day from Paris to Finistère, Land's End, at the eastern edge of Brittany...

This blog is a mystery, a travelogue across time and place, and a memoir about life and art, museums and research.