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Norwich describes itself as “A Fine City”. Indeed it is. The city centre streets are clean, car-free, and lined with a huge variety of shops, restaurants, and service providers such as key-cutters and barbers. All very interesting. And there’s a lovely river too.

The City of Norwich website tells me: “On 17 July 1967, London Street became the first shopping street in the UK to be pedestrianised. It started a revolution that saw people given priority over traffic in city centres.”

This building stands in London Street, at the junction with St Andrews Hill. It was designed by FCR Palmer for the National Provincial Bank, and was completed in 1925 [1]. The National Provincial became NatWest after a series of mergers and takeovers. NatWest moved out in 2017.

I also sketched Norwich Cathedral, from the…

The evocative, symbolic art of Odilon Redon drew its inspiration from the internal world of his imagination. For years this student of Rodolphe Bresdin worked only in black and white, producing powerful and haunting charcoal drawings, lithographs, and etchings. Just as these black works, or Noirs, began to receive critical and public acclaim in the 1890s, Redon discovered the marvels of color through the use of pastel. His immersion in color and this new technique brought about a change in the artist’s approach to his subject matter as well. Flower Clouds is one of a number of pastels executed around 1905 that are dominated by spiritual overtones. Here a sailboat bears two figures, perhaps two…

“Painted in two stages, with a gap of around four years between each stage, it shows the change in Renoir’s art during the 1880s, when he was beginning to move away from Impressionism and looking instead to classical art. The group on the right, which includes a mother and her two daughters and the woman in profile in the centre, is painted in a characteristically Impressionist manner with delicate feathery touches of rich luminous tones. On the left of the composition, completed during the second stage, Renoir adopted a more linear style. The figures here, including the full-length young woman and the man standing behind her, have clearly defined outlines, precisely drawn features and a greater sense of three-dimensional form.”

National Gallery, London

Picture by Lyrix, Berlin, Germany, 2020

near Wittenbergplatz, including lots of typical german cabs 😉

I liked the mood that evening… not sure if it was my own or the one lying over the city.

In early 1906, as Paul Signac (1863-1935) was completing his large painting of the church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde and the port of Marseilles, he was visited by the former Nabi Maurice Denis, and Ker-Xavier Roussel, who had a house nearby. After that, Signac visited Spain briefly, then went to Paris for the annual Salon des Indépendants, where that painting was exhibited alongside six other landscapes of his.

In the Spring, he travelled to the Netherlands, where he visited Rotterdam and Amsterdam for the second time, and painted watercolour sketches. During the summer he cruised the Mediterranean on board a friend’s yacht. For much of the rest of the year, he was busy turning his sketches into finished oil paintings.

Paul Signac (1863-1935), Steamboats, Rotterdam (Cachin 436) (1906), oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm, Shimane Art Museum, Shimane, Japan. WikiArt.

Signac’s finished painting of Steamboats, Rotterdam (1906) is remarkable in retaining…