Art

I live fairly close to Montmartre. Walking around there I have made a few discoveries, linked to art.

I found a very tiny street, Cité Germain Pilon; a surprisingly modest homage for one of the leading French Renaissance sculptors. Germain Pilon (abt. 1537 – 1590) has some ten sculptures at the Louvre and is represented in leading museums worldwide. You can also find his works in a number of churches and official buildings.

He worked for the Royal Family and some of the Royal tombs at the Saint-Denis Basilica (see previous post) are decorated by him, including the one you can see below, representing Henry II and Catherine de Medicis. In 1585 he decorated the still working clock on the Tour d’Horloge (Clock Tower), part of the Palais de Justice and the Conciergerie, replacing an older clock from 1370 (see previous post). The Pont Neuf cornices (see previous post) are decorated with 385 "mascarons" (or grotesque masks), designed by him.

More or less in front of Moulin Rouge (see previous posts) I found a plate which indicated that the Swedish artist, Anders Zorn (1860-1920), lived and worked in this building between 1889 and 1896. Zorn did a lot of portraits including official ones of three American presidents (Grover Cleveland, W.H. Taft and Th. Roosevelt) and also of several French – and of course Swedish - personalities. He’s also well-known for his nude paintings and etchings and is well represented in leading museums. (The etchings below are from my private “collection” – I bought them for very modest money with the pays from different summer jobs in the 60’s.)

The below plate on a building at Montmartre gives some nice fake names of people who obviously prefer to stay anonymous. For the fun I linked the names to some works of the different artists. I had a problem with Gonzales. I could have made a quiz – link the names to the works - but please feel relaxed.

Pictures with black frames are mine, with white frames basically from Wikipedia and Wikimedia.

Addendum Monday Jan. 5 at 1.45 p.m.:

Cergie made a remark about the similitude between the above sculpture by Germain Pilon and the Wallace fountains. She is right (of course). I took this photo half an hour ago of a Wallace fountain, in a snowy Paris. Cergie wondered who had designed the now 135 year old fountains (with fresh drinkable water). As far as I know, they were designed by Mr. Wallace himself! Mr.Pilon’s sculpture has obviously three ladies. Mr. Wallace added a fourth one. (You can read something more about the Wallace fountains on some of my previous posts.)

Second addendum: Monday Jan. 5 at 11 p.m.:

As pointed out by Maxime, Gonzales obviously should not refer to Speedy Gonzales, but rather to Eva Gonzalès, who died young (1849-1883), impressionist painter, pupil of Edouard Manet. To try to repair for my ignorance, here are two paintings - one that Manet made of her and one of her own paintings which today can be found at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.