a blind flaneur

Édouard Manet. Olympia. 1863. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

Édouard Manet. Woman in a Bathtub. 1878-79.pastel on paper 55×45cm. Musee d’Orsay, Paris.
Méry Laurent was the model for Odette, the actress who married Swann in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. She also was Manet’s lover and muse for a time, when she modeled for this pastel.
Jeffrey Meyers writes in Impressionist Quartet (p. […]

Rainier Maria Rilke works at his writing desk in the Hôtel Biron, Paris [Source: Requiem for a Friend]
I found this photo yesterday as I jumped from Rainier Maria Rilke to Paula Modersohn-Becker and back again. It comes from a web site supporting a 2005 independent film (The Greater Circulation) about the writing of Requiem for […]

[Photo by novella78]

I remember seductive summer days in the Musée Rodin when the windows were thrown open and soft,rose-scented breezes caressed the marble and bronze. Where else but Paris would a museum open its windows to the world?

Auguste Rodin. L’Illusion soeur d’Icare. 1895. Musée Rodin, Paris. [Photo by Dave Rytell]
This sculpture beguiled me when I saw it at the Musée Rodin. I so much wanted to touch her wing. It was marble but it looked like a living thing. It had the delicacy of feathers, the muscularity of pulsing blood, the […]