When I’ve written historical novels in the past, I always stumbled into a hole in history, a time or person about which very little was known (Jesus Christ and King Lear), so I was able to fill out the story by making up a lot of details and filling in the story around what we did know, or in the case of Lear, what Shakespeare had imagined. But when I decided to write a novel based around the Impressionist and Post Impressionist art movements in France, I had no idea what an overwhelming wealth of information I’d have to draw on.

While no one knew where Jesus was for most of thirty years, I could pretty-much find out what each of the Impressionists had for breakfast on any given day. I was nearly four years doing the research, including living in Paris for a couple of months, learning to speak French at very “Tarzan/Jane” level, and learning  how to paint (a little). I even wrote the entire manuscript of Bite Me while I was researching Sacré Bleu. Finally, with a deadline looming, I had to stop researching and just write the book. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t more to learn, and in the case of painting, more to see, and thus, I’ve created this guide.

Mostly I’ve tried here to fill in the visuals for the paintings that we simply couldn’t put in the book, as well as give you a geographical and historical context where I could. But even as I put this guide together I realize there were many things about the period and the art that I didn’t know, and few things that I got wrong. I’m a novelist, not a historian, and I’m far more comfortable with making stuff up than with looking it up. So you may find errors and omissions in this guide. I’m going to try to keep this blog and app alive and updated, so if you find a mistake, say so in the comments field. (Cite your source, if you know it.) Don’t be a jerk about it, just let me know, and I’ll try to fix it.

Together, we’ll all learn something.

A Note on the art and photographs.

To the best of our knowledge, the art and photographs in this blog are either in the public domain and have been obtained from public domain sources or have been created by us for this blog. If you suspect that any material infringes on copyright, please e-mail me directly at TheAuthorGuy@gmail.com and I will take it down immediately.

The Village of Auvers Sur Oise lay about ten minutes (by train) north of Paris, over the River Oise. Vincent lived here for several months after he left the sanitarium in Arles, after his famous breakdown in 1889.

This is the Inn in Auvers where Vincent lived. This picture taken in 2009.

“And what will I get for my hat. Will you tell my future?”

Vincent Van Gogh – Self-Portrait, 1887 (Original Painting in the Detroit Institute of Arts)

“He painted a final crow, just four brushstrokes to imply wings, then stepped back.” Wheatfield with Crows – Vincent, 1890 – Now at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Today, there is a sign at the junction of the three roads through the wheat and corn fields where Vincent painted his last painting.

“The church,” Vincent said. “There’s a painting of the church in my room at the inn. You can see, the church is not blue in life, but I painted it blue. I wanted to commune with God.” The Church at Auvers – 2009. Clearly not blue yet…

“You lie! I have been to the inn and seen your church. She is not in that painting.”Vincent’s painting of the Church at Auvers. 1890 (Now in the Musee D’Orsay in Paris)

“Vincent left the painting and the easel, picked a single, crushed tube of paint from his paint box and put it in his pocket, then, holding his chest, he trudged down the road that ran along the ridge above town a mile to Dr. Gachet’s house.” The road through the woods, along the ridge above Auvers. I took this in 2009. It was a hot August day, and the forest floor near the corn field was covered with brown leaves that smelled toasted in the heat. You could stop and hear them crackle in the heat. The corn stalks were starting to dry out, and in the slight breeze it sounded like faint applause when they rubbed together.

Theo Van Gogh – 1889

Vincent and Theo lay buried side by side, not two-hundred meters from the spot

Madonna and Child by Domenico Veneziano around 1440. Note that the browns and greens of the painting have degraded and faded over the years, while the blue remains relatively vibrant (as does the gold, which is real, gold leaf). One of the reasons ultramarine was so prized, was that it did not fade like other plant or metal-based blues.

A polished piece of lapis lazuli, from which ultramarine blue is made.

Crushed lapis lazuli, or ultramarine pigment. This photo actually apears a bit duller than ultramarine that I’ve seen in person. It may be due to lighting, or it may be not be finished in the processing.

“he made his way across the square to the edge of the Montmartre, where he looked out over Paris, shining in the noon day sun”

View of Paris from Montmartre looking south-west over St. Denis. Today, of course, there are no more factories streaming smoke, but in Lucien’s day, there would have been dozens of smoke stacks, and you see that in a lot of Impressionist paintings.

Stairs today leading down the back side of Montmartre to Rue Caulincourt, where Henri and Lucien kept their studio.

“Lucien set off down the two-hundred and forty-two steps to that very same boulevard into the neighborhood around Place Pigalle”

The stairs from Montmartre to Place Pigalle today. Lucien would have been coming from even higher on the butte than this picture shows.

“In the salon of the brothel on Rue d’Aboise, a girl in a red negligee who had been dozing on a velvet divan when he came in…”

Two Friends – Henri Toulouse-Lautrec

Place Pigalle, which was alive with cafés, brothels, cabarets, and on some mornings, the “parade of models” around the fountain in the square.

Place Pigalle – Felix Buhot – 1878

You can see the fort on the right.

“I will vouch for that,” said Mireille, who scampered away, puffing

like a tiny marshmallow locomotive. “He loves that fucking hat.”

Drawing by Elias D’Elia

Eli drew this cartoon for me, but he came up with a much more 21st Century cute Mireille than the real one, as you’ll see below…

“Lucien was anxious waiting among the whores.“

Parlor of a Brothel – Henri Toulouse-Lautrec

“I know you,” said the round blond. “You’re Monsieur Lessard, the baker.”

In Le Rat Mort – Henri Toulouse-Lautrec

This painting was actually of a patron of the restaurant Dead Rat, described in the scene where Henri and Lucien go to breakfast, but I found the image after I had already written the brothel scene and it was uncanny how close the woman was to the whore I described, so it went into the book. I realized later when I went through my photos, that I’d seen this painting in the Courtauld Gallery in London, so maybe it had stuck in my mind.

Mirielle and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, with a collection of his brothel paintings. As you can see, Mireille, was, indeed, as tiny as Henri, and she was reputed to be his favorite.Photo by Henri’s friend, Maurice Guilbert, who we’ll see more from later.

“They had both attended Corman’s studio with Vincent, painted along side of him, drank, laughed, and argued color theory with him in the cafes of Montmartre.”

Vincent Van Gogh – by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec – 1886 or 87 when they were all studying at Corman’s Studio.

This is the view today from the iron fence at the edge of the Place du Tertre, looking toward the Eiffel Tower. The tower was still 15 or so years away in 1873, when Lucien and Pere Lessard were looking out over Paris, but I didn’t have a picture from Montemartre looking toward the Louvre. Oops. I didn’t know I was going to write the scene when I was there.

 

“Minette was petite, and pretty, and could throw a rock as well as any boy. She inspired a love in Lucien so profound that it made him nearly breathless with the need to pull her hair and profess her passionate cooties to the world” Portrait of Jean-Michelle Pissarro (called Minette)- Camille Pissaro 1873

“It will hang next to a Cézanne. I believe he has an affinity for wrestling dogs.”

Photo of Camille Pissarro and Paul Cezanne 1873 – Note that even in the year of the scene when Pissarro is only in his early 40s, his beard has gone white. Pissarro and Cezanne often painted together in Auvers and Pontoise, small towns just north of Paris. Cezanne, from Aix in Provence, Southern France,did not like the city.

Lucien watched his father watch the sunrise break the horizon, turning the river Seine into a bright copper-colored ribbon across Paris.

I actually don’t remember if I took this in the morning or the evening, but let’s say it’s morning.

“An hour later the ticket had been tacked up on the wall under Pissarro’s painting, a small landscape looking down from a hill in Auvers-sur-Oise, portraying the red tile roofs and the river below.” Red Tile Roofs – Camille Pissarro Well, I was imagining the painting when I wrote that line, so there’s no, “river down below”, but these are the red tile roofs in Auvers.

She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, a delicate thing in a white dress with puffy sleeves and great ultramarine bows all down its front and at the cuffs.

The Swing – Renoir

The bows on this dress are most definitely ultramarine blue, and so strikingly so that this had to be the girl that won Pissaro’s painting. She will also figure largely in Renoir’s life in the story, but that’s for later on.

“They sat on a bench across from the cabaret the Lapin Agile, a small vineyard at their back, the city of Paris spread out before them”

The Lapin Agile as it appears today. It is still open for business. Just across the street is the last vineyard still left on Montmartre and they hold a harvest festival on the Butte every year to celebrate its bounty.

This is the vinyard today. The bench where Lucien and Julliette sat would be almost directly under the lower Rue Saint Salas sign, and there is a bench there today, but I didn’t know I was going to write that scene when I took this picture.

“It’s taller than I thought it would be when they started it.” The tower had been barely three stories tall when she had disappeared.

The Eiffle Tower in 1888, when it was still under construction. About the time Julliete disappeared.

“The master has painted over another painting, and over the years, the old image is beginning to show through. It is not clear, but you can see that something has come before and does not belong.”

Detail from the The Old Guitarist- Pablo Picasso- 1903. Notice the famous painting has been painted over the portrait of a woman that is beginning to show through, a Pentimento.

 

Here’s Pentimento I found myself, just a few minutes ago, on one of Google’s new art project sites. They are digitizing great works of art of the world, in very high resolution. Thing about Venus, and the other pictures at the Uffuzi in Florence, is you can’t photograph them. Anyway, it’s Venus’s first thumb, sneaking through the final painting.

Looks like she had a much bigger thumbnail on the first draft.

“No, not really. But it is Romanian. Made from beetles hand-picked from the roots of weeds near Bucharest. But they are ugly beetles. They might be virgins. I wouldn’t fuck them. You want some?”

It was the painting of a redheaded woman in a plain white blouse and black skirt, looking out a window.

The Laundress by Toulouse-Lautrec, about 1887 or 88. This is my favorite Toulouse-Lautrec painting of them all, and I’m not sure why, except it seems to warm and quiet compared to the cabaret and brothel pictures. It was this painting the led me to create the relationship between Henri and Carmen.

“Olympia,” said Lucien. “A masterpiece, but you are much prettier than Manet’s model, Victorine.

Olympia, by Edouard Manet. This painting and the model, Victorine Meurent would become very important to French art history. We’ll be hearing more about this painting and Victorine later in the book, but at the time, this painting, more than likely, was only displayed in Manet’s home or brought out for special shows.

They were all young artists, full of themselves, their talent, and the infinite possibilities of the results of mixing imagination and craft. They had spent the day at Cormon’s studio, listening to the master prattle on about the academic tradition and techniques of the masters.

Emile Bernard -Self-Portrait, about the time that he was attending Corman’s studio with Toulouse-Lautrec.

“Monsieur, I am not a model.” A quiet voice, shy.

Carmen Gaudin – this is the only photograph I’ve ever been able to find of Carmen. Appropriately, she is looking away from the camera. I couldn’t find credit, but it was likely taken by Henri’s friend Maurice Guilbert.

The Salon des Refusés There’s a whole political story behind how the Salon des Refusés and how it’ssort of interestingly but indirectly tied into Cinco de Mayo and even the Civil War, which sort of connects back to Whistler and Manet’s painting careers, but, well, people use the phrase “sort of” as much as I do, really shouldn’t be writing history, so I’ll let you click the link and I’ll come back and fill in here later if I have time. Now for the chapter.

Camille and Julie Pissarro, around the time of the scene 1863

“Machines of the rejected,” said Pissarro, for once a note of despair dampening the Caribbean lilt in his accent.

Pissarro and Julie were living with her mother at the foot of Montemartre at the time. Artists, writers, musicians of the time would refer to their works as “machines”, making it a generic way to discuss a work of art. So Emile Zola, an novelist, might discuss his latest “machine” with his friend, Paul Cezanne. Perhaps it was the Industrial Revolution, and the sudden mass production of pottery and other objects that had always been made by hand, but were now being made my machines, that was the source of the term.

“They moved into the column of people that was squeezing itself into the palace: the upper-class men in top hats, black tailcoats, and tight gray trousers, women in black crinoline or black and maroon silk, their long skirts dusted at the fringe with white from the macadam; the new working class, men in white and blue striped jackets and straw boaters, the women in bright dresses of every color, sporting frilly pastel parasols, the mandala of the Sunday afternoon of leisure, a recent gift of the Industrial Revolution.”

Music-in-the-Tuileries-Gardens-1862 -Eudoard Manet

Manet meant here, to show Paris at leisure. This would be a Sunday Afternoon among the upper class in the park, probably a very similar looking crowd to what would have been at the Salon de Refusee. The Jardine des Tulaeries (Tuleries Garden), is, in fact, a palace garden.

“Excuse me, Monsieur Manet,” said the tall man. “I am Frédéric Bazille, and these are my friends—” Portrait of Frederick Bazille by Pierre August Renoir – 1867

“The painter Monet,” said the youth with the lace cuffs. He clicked his heels and bowed slightly. “Honored, sir.” Portrait of Claude Monet by Pierre August Renoir – around 1875, so the Monet at the Salon will a younger, possibly fancier Monet.

“Renoir,” said the thin fellow with a shrug. Self-portrait of Renoir – Pierre August Renoir – 1876

“Well she’s not wet,” said the woman. “This is not a picture of bathers. Looks to me like she’s deciding which of these two she’s going to bonk in the bushes.” Dejener sur le Herb (Luncheon on the Grass) -Edouard Manet – 1863

“Perhaps we’ve happened onto the scene before the bathing,” said Manet. “The motif is classical, madame. After Raphael’s Judgment of Paris.”

Actually, the painting Manet probably was inspired by was the above, Giorgione’s Fete Champetre – 1508. (Feast in the Fields)I probably read the Raphael bit from above, and didn’t find the actual painting. The problem wasn’t that no one had ever painted a naked picnic before, it was no one had painted a modern, “real” picnic. You just didn’t do such things. Anyway, by the time I figure this out, it was too late to change the line in the book. Oops.

He was a gaunt, dark-haired fellow about the same age as Manet, with an outrageous gondola of a mustache riding his lip and a monocle screwed into his eye like the brass porthole of a warship. Arrangement in Gold and Brown – Self Portrait. James McNeill Whistler

“Ah, Mother,” said Whistler in English. “She’s an arrangement in grey and black; her disapproval falls like a shadow across the ocean. And yours?” Arrangement in Grey and Black #1- James McNeill Whistler – 1871

Even though Whistler isn’t completely into his Oriental phase yet, you can see how the picture could almost be overlaid with a Yin-Yang symbol. The perfect balance of object and space. That’s Zen composition, not the “rule of thirds” taught in Western painting.There’s a revolution brewing in painting, and Manet and Whistler, although they don’t know it at the time, are at the forefront.

“My White Girl. She was turned down by the Salon and the London Academy. Her name is Jo Hiffernan said Whistler. “An Irish hellcat—skin like milk. Quick-witted for a woman, and a soul as deep as a well.” Wapping on Thames – 1860-64- James McNeill Whistler – I don’t know why this one wasn’t retitled to a music arrangement theme, perhaps because it was before he felt that approach applied to his work. Perhaps the National Gallery in Washington wasn’t going to put up with Whistler’s tomfoolery. Nevertheless, you can see this painting of Jo and some of Whistler’s friends, at the National Gallery, about twenty feet from Symphony in White #1- The White Girl

“All that lead white soaks right through your skin. I still see rings around every point of light. My doctor says it will take months for my vision to return to normal.”

Seeing swirls around light sources is an actual symptom of lead poisioning, which Whistler actually suffered. In reality, his White Girl was at the Salon de Refuses, but he was not. He was still in Biarritz getting over his lead poisoning and, yes, getting smashed by a rogue wave. That too is a true story. But the reason you’re looking at Starry Night, by Vincent Van Gogh-1889 – Because of the swirls in this painting, and his notorious habit of eating paint, one of the diagnoses in retro that doctors have made is that lead poisoning may have exacerbated his other physical and mental difficulties.

“Jemmie, this White Girl of yours wasn’t the painting you were working on in Biarritz when you had your accident, was it?”

“No, of course not. That was in the studio. The Biarritz painting was called The Blue Wave.“ Arrangement in Blue and Silver – The Blue Wave- Biarritz - 1863 “Arrangement” is the revised title of The Blue Wave. In the 1870s, Whistler befriended a composer, and after discussion of their “machines,” he retitled all of his paintings as musical compositions. So his White Girl became Symphony in White #1, and The Blue Wave became Arrangement in Blue and Silver, the painting known commonly as Whistler’s Mother was never titled that. He painted it after he had started titling his work after music, so it has always been Arrangement in Grey and Black #1.  

Crushed lapis lazuli, or ultramarine pigment. This photo actually appears a bit duller than synthetic ultramarine. It may be due to lighting, or it may be not be from impurities in the stone. Powdered, synthetic ultramarine appears so vibrant, that Yves Klein, a French artist in the 1940s, became obsessed with reproducing a paint that could retain the appearance of the powdered pigment while suspended in a medium and after years of experimentation, was able to achieve the effect and was able to patent the process and color International Klein Blue was named for him. It should be noted, that Klein’s preferred and patented method for painting was to cover models in pigment and direct them to move on a large canvas. Here a two of Klein’s three dimensional works, that really show the vibrancy of the color better than his body paintings.

Large Tree with Sponge – 1962

Synthetic ultramarine. (Sometimes called French Ultramarine)

French Ultramarine

In the early 1800s the prohibitive cost of natural ultramarine pigment motivated first the Royal College of Arts in Britain and a few years later, the Society for the Encouragement for National Industry in France to offer cash prizes to anyone who could actually produce an artificial that was chemically identical to the pigment made from lapis. At the time, natural ultramarine was selling for a little over eight British Pounds to the ounce, while gold went for a little over four. By using the byproducts of glass furnaces, chemists in both Germany and France were able to produce the synthetic ultramarine, and despite the variety of places of discovery, the product came to be known as French Ultramarine. This is the blue that the impressionists used most of the time, Renoir in particular, although they sometimes also used another synthetic blue, Prussian Blue, which tends to have a more greenish and less vibrant tint and was used more often to mix with yellow to produce greens.

Those Prussian Fucks

Thru out the book you’ll find The Colorman referring to those “fucking Prussians” and spitting. You see, until the mid to late 1800s, there were still many rare and difficult to obtain pigments being used. National policy was often changed just because of, say, the inability to get enough dye for the uniforms of a country’s army. Then along came the German chemists.

Around this time, most of the world’s major cities were being lighted with gas. But not natural gas as we know it, drilled and piped from the ground, but coal gas. As central boilers, large quanties of coal were more or less cooked, under pressure in large metal vessels, and as a byproduct of their heating they gave off burnable gas. The distillation of coal also produced a byproduct called coal tar, which was produced in quantities that really became unwieldy. German chemists, using coal tar, developed processes to produce vivid, permanent, and largely non-toxic artificial pigments, which undermined the market for the rare, natural pigments prized by painters and color men. (Their production also turned the Germans from a largely agricultural country to a manufacturing powerhouse.) Between that and the movable type printing press invented by Gutenberg, leading the way for reproduction of information and images, the Germans (Prussians) they pissed the Colorman off.

The Seige of Paris

As the siege had fallen in the autumn, every vegetable garden in Montmartre and the Maquis was brimming with maize and snail-scarred squash.

Montmartre Vegetable Gardens – Vincent Van Gogh – 1886

for a while because they could graze on the back slope of the butte and in the fencerows of the Maquis, the shantytown by the cemetery, but when the grass was nibbled to nubs and the National Guard’s horses were being slaughtered for meat, then even the sad-eyed Sylvie and Astrid found their way into the pot-au-feu, which Madame Jacob salted with her tears.

The Hill of Montmartre with Quarry – Vincent Van Gogh – 1887

This is one of the many quarries around Montmartre at the time. The Cemetery is in one of these. On the other side of this hill is the city of Paris.

He shook the cooper’s hand, then hired a rag picker with a donkey cart to haul the bags of sawdust up the butte.

A Donkey Cart, a Boy, and a Woman – Vincent Van Gogh – 1886

The rag picker wasn’t a scoundrel, but scoundrels envied his laugh.

The Ragpicker- Edouard Manet 1873

But your mother should thank the saints she lives in Louveciennes or there would be fat bitch pie for everyone on the butte, he thought.

The next morning, while Father was still proofing the oaky loaves for baking, Lucien made his way up rue Lepic, past the still blades of the Moulin de la Galette…

and down through the Maquis, with its row upon row of tiny, ramshackle houses, splintering privies, decimated vegetable gardens fenced with pickets of rough sticks, and the occasional broken wagon or junk pile.

Le Grande Couer- Ramon Casas – 1898

This is nearly 30 years after the war, but you can see how the shacks of the Maquis lined the hill, the poorest neighborhood in the poor neighborhood of Paris. Sacre Coeur, the great white dome in the background, wouldn’t be built until 1880, ten years after the war.

There, among the sycamores and chestnut trees…

the moss-covered monuments and blackened bronze crypt doors, he found his prey.

(This tomb is actually at Pere La Chaise on the other side of Paris, but it had some awesome moss and looked a little creepy, so, you know, it’s in…)

There are a lot of famous people buried at Cemetarié Montmartre. Here is the tomb of the Degas family. Eduard Degas is buried here.

A Roman Studio_Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1877

They were large canvases. And Monet had attempted his own luncheon on the grass, a great, twenty-foot-long canvas that he dragged, rolled up, all over France with a pretty model named Camille Doncieux whom he’d met in the Batignolles and his friend Frédéric Bazille to pose for all the male figures. “But don’t let your ambition become too large too early, Lucien,” Monet had told him…

“Luncheon on the Grass” – 1865, Claude Monet – This is the painting Monet wanted to make after seeing Manet’s “The Bath”, later titled, “Luncheon on the Grass” in 1863. Note the guy in gray in the middle, and the one in black on the left, is the same guy, Frederick Bazille. And the women are all Camille. More about this later, but it is a really huge canvas if you consider they were toting it all over Normandy, on trains, with wet oil paint on it. It’s at the Musee D’Orsay in Paris, now, where all of the Louvre’s Impressionist paintings live. More about that later, too.

 Olympia – Edouard Manet – 1863

“You can use Goya’s Maja pose. That’s what Manet started with.”

What a completely disturbing thought. Olympia did look remarkably like Goya’s   Nude Maja regarding the viewer, daring him,

and Manet clearly admired Goya, using Goya’s Maja on the Balcony as inspiration

for his own painting of the Morisot family, The Balcony,

and Goya’s war paintings from Napoleon’s invasion of Spain

(Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, Third of May, 1808, Francisco Goya-1814)

for his Execution of Maximilian

“Can I watch?” asked the Colorman. He slid out of his chair.

She stopped and looked at him over her shoulder. “Why?”

“Pretty skin. Nothing to read.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Come on.”

Bleu before the Bath – by Elias D’Elia