Pont Aven Saturday

We returned on a cloudy Saturday morning with the sun breaking through occasionally as well as light mist throughout the day. At high tide, the river looks totally different. Only one of Gauguin's paintings here looks down the river and it has just a single boat under sail, more of a suggestion of a boat than a real depiction of what would have been a steady activity at this head water. 

               

One of Gauguin's paintings from Pont Aven depicts women washing clothes on the rocks here, just below the last of the mills that were set up to grind grain and make paper. 

This is the little restaurant where we had a light dinner of crepes. It was run by a young couple who were nursing a baby just as we arrived. They put the baby to bed on the third floor and started serving us and another couple on the second floor. 

This was our table with a view out over the harbor pictured below. 

A roof made with simple timbers in a local design shop.

Pont Aven, Friday Night

We got to Pont Aven just as the sun was setting and the tide draining out down the long river to the sea.

Most of the sailboats have double keels so that they will stay upright on the mudflats but some have stilt-like struts that attach to the sides to hold them up. A few of the boats just  roll over, but it's a very calm spot even when the wind picks up, sheltered by hills on either side of the river.

We liked the yellow house in the top of the picture with its large garden and view of the anchorage. When Gauguin painted here none of the houses had been built on the far bank which had meadows all along the river. Now the harbor has a long wooded park with an 8 kilometer walking trail along the shore.

We ate our dinner so quickly that we only had a chance to take a picture when the muscle shells were empty. They were delicious, cooked in broths flavored with curry and onion (Chris) and coconut and tomato (Betsy). We had crepes as a second course, all at a little restaurant along the quay. 

Friday, June 21, Stopping in Vitre in Brittany

We drove across Brittany stopping at the little city of Vitre, near Rennes, exploring its magnificent hotel de ville with its witches' hat towers, moat, and ramparts.

Part of it had been left in ruins with wildflowers growing everywhere.

The town had a wonderful range of architecture from medieval stone works to half timbered houses. I liked this little turret of brick sticking out of a half-timbered house with wrought iron everywhere.

The sun had just come out as we passed this little vegetable store, and you can see the cobblestones are just drying off after showers.

Lots of buildings had very detailed stone carvings over the portals, and the details were fun to try to photograph with my new camera.

I liked the contrast between the brick and the half-timbered styles in these two adjacent houses. Almost all the roofs in Brittany have slate now but many of the paintings I have seen show thatched roofs.  A lot of the half-timbered buildings in this town had overhangs that acted as arcades in the town center.

Chartres

A few words of introduction for this blog: I am a teacher of English, painting, and drawing who first encountered art history through a college job as a projectionist, assisting professors with the projection of their slides. I often attended four lectures in a row, getting a sweeping overview of art history from the excellent faculty at my college. Almost a decade passed before I could afford to travel to the parts of Europe to see first hand the paintings, sculptures, and architecture I had helped project in those college lecture halls. But by then I had begun teaching so had long vacations to travel throughout Europe by bicycle and had learned enough Italian and French to speak with people who lived in the contexts of the art that had so intrigued me and to try to answer the question that interested me most in art history - what was life like for the artists and audiences of the art in earlier centuries? 

This trip is my eleventh using a bicycle as a means for exploring the context of European art. I love the way that a bicycle gives me great flexibility to cover quite a bit of ground at a speed that allows me to stop whenever something interests me without worrying about parking. I focused on visiting the towns in Brittany where Gauguin first moved when he tired of Paris and started to search for a wilder and more undeveloped landscape, the settings of Arles and St. Remy-en-Provence where Van Gogh moved in the last several years of his life, and the world around Aix-en-Provence to which Cezanne returned after his brief time in Paris. In the late 1880's all three artists wished to move beyond the landscapes of urban and suburban Paris that dominated the work of the Impressionists. All three wished to find a landscape that would summon from them a deep emotional response and that would startle the art world of Paris and win them acclaim. 

I wanted to see the landscapes that inspired these painters, to walk and cycle through them and feel the qualities of light, atmosphere and landscape form that led to some of the most important art we have from the last hundred and fifty years. The summer before I had visited a number of excellent collections - the Musee d'Orsay, The National Gallery in Washington, The Metropolitan in New York, and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Now I wanted to see the land and man made forms that had inspired these works. I got to see some other cultural landmarks as well, the villages of the Luberon  and the Cap d'Antibes which have both inspired a number of artists and writers. 

Since I only had twenty days and wished to visit parts of Brittany beyond the reach of rail service and then move on to the south of France, I rented a car to move between the focal points of the trip. But if you are planning a trip through France, the combination of bike and train or bike alone will carry you most anywhere you want to go. The system of secondary roads used to navigate the vast stretches of farmland make excellent bike paths and newer path systems like those running down along the coast in Bordeaux and up the middle of the Luberon make biking there a real pleasure. 

Our first day in France we chose to stay in Chartres as it's a relatively easy drive from the airport. We stayed on the edge of town but had two great visits, one on the first afternoon to the village and the exterior of the cathedral and gardens and one the next morning to see the interior statuary.

This shot was taken from the steps of the cathedral catching the late afternoon light during a quick peak of the sun on a cloudy day. I'm using a new camera,  a Nikon P7700, and having fun with it, taking about 400 pictures a day.

This is my favorite of all the carvings on the portals of Chartres, the portrait of Abraham and Isaac, the second figures from the left. I've always liked the contrast between this pair and the other figures and the expression on Abraham's face as he turns toward the angel, one hand on his child and the other on the scythe, beautiful in the late afternoon light.

This is our rental car, a sporty little Renault diesel with a hatchback we hope will fit the bikes when we have taken them out of their suitcases and a huge sunroof and GPS. The first day we had it set in French, but we've backslid and set it to English for the long drive across to Brittany. We bought breakfast and lunch food at a giant market on the edge of Chartres, with 5000 kinds of cheese on the shelves and lots of other stuff like clothes and luggage. Our favorite purchases: goat cheese, apples, local apple juice, and chocolate spread  - like Nutella.