Just another Louvre Wednesday

The presentation was informative, and the free lunch afterwards put all American buffets I've experienced to shame, so my time at Ecole Polytechnique was well spent.  I arrived back in Cachan around 2:30 pm and spent about three hours fiddling around: I revised my line widths summary, polished up my threshold analysis, and took some spectra of a yet-more-tilted cavity.  These I might redo tomorrow morning, since the new cavities take a while to settle into a particular response when pumped.

I hurried back to the dorms after work and ate my baguette sandwich supper, then met Linda and set off for the Louvre.  The museum is much less crowded on Wednesday evenings; maybe it's less-than-common knowledge that it's open late, though I don't know why that would be.  In contrast with last week's statues, we opted for the vast collection of French paintings on the second floor of the Sully wing (it may have spilled over into Richelieu; I'm not sure).  Some of the paintings didn't quite speak to me, sure, but the ones that did more than compensated.  Here is a reason to carefully prepare oneself before entering the Louvre:  one can walk innocently into a room and this painting is. Suddenly. Right. There.

That's Renoir's La Lecture, and I could stare at it for minutes on end.  I did exactly that, as a matter of fact.  Why can't the colors look the same through my camera as they do in person?  You don't know, you really don't know what it's like unless you're there.  Renoir's skin tones incorporate every color of his palette - pinks, to be sure, and reds, but also blue and yellow and green and violet - what would be a bruised mess in any other hands becomes an ephemeral, softly-radiating vision of tranquility.  Even Linda, whose aesthetic tastes tend towards hyper-realism, admitted that this "fuzzy" painting catches the eye from across the room.  I could hardly bear to move on to other rooms.

But I'm glad I did, because we had quite a nice time browsing and being amateur art critics.  The next-highest-point of the evening was the discovery of a small room of paintings by an artist unknown to us, but whose paintings we both really enjoyed.  Claude Lorrain painted several scenes of ships at sunset, amidst classical architecture lapped by the ocean at its base.   For some reason, this particular collection of elements is idyllic as far as I'm concerned.  We lingered there for a while.

We lingered for much more time in room displaying Rubens' Medici cycle.  I'd heard his name before, but knew nothing of his work.  I still don't know too much, but at some point he was commissioned to paint a series of 24 huge works for the Luxembourg palace, and now they are all in a room in the Louvre.  Each one should have been the work of a lifetime, I feel, and yet they just keep going.  Linda and I sat on the well-placed benches in the middle of the room and just soaked it in.

We didn't see nearly all of the French paintings, but there's next week, and the next...The Louvre is a wonderful place.

On the way home, we went and got some more world-famous macarons, because why not?  Yum.

And for tomorrow: le Musee d'Orsay.  So much Renoir.  I can't wait.