Category: Uncategorized

The painting depicts one of the engineering marvels of Caillebotte’s day, an immense bridge spanning the rail yards of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Two men gaze through the massive iron trellises of the bridge toward the depot, the roof of which is glimpsed between the X-shaped girders at the right. Rather than cloaking the latticework of the bridge in vapor, as Monet did in his contemporaneous views of the station, Caillebotte audaciously exploited its unembellished geometry—the embodiment of brute industrial architecture—to organize his composition. The structural elements of the Le Pont de l’Europe, esquisse, flattened against the plane of the canvas and cut off by its edges, press the figures into the very foreground, inviting the viewer to…

Poetry Partners #40

‘My Paternal Grandparents’, a poem by Kate Blake of ‘aroused’

Nana and Pop met on the ward
when she gently tended
his gruesome war wounds

he a tall handsome older gent
she a tiny gentle English rose

he solemnly declared he had nothing
and lived in the middle of nowhere

but love blinded her to his reality
and after the war she sailed south

with another nurse to join their beau’s
a huge adventure in the Australian bush

completely off grid with snakes and spiders
sixteen miles from any neighbour or station

in his family home with his sisters and brothers
the children from his first marriage had moved on

they birthed my aunt and father
she sailed back to UK every two years

taught us all to knit crochet and embroider
the boys were more accomplished than I

• Kate Blake: https://aroused.blog/

A Crystalline by ben Alexander…

In the first of these two articles looking at the short career and paintings of Spencer Gore (1878–1914), first president of the Camden Town Group, I showed examples from the start of his professional career to his marriage and influence by paintings of Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin in 1911.

In the same year, as president of the sixteen elected members of the Camden Town Group, Gore joined their meetings every Saturday afternoon in rooms on the first floor of Sickert’s studio at 19 Fitzroy Street, Camden Town, in north London. Living with his wife in their first floor flat at 2 Houghton Place, just off Mornington Crescent, he had but a short walk to those meetings.

Spencer Gore (1878–1914), The Fig Tree (c 1912), oil on canvas, 63.5 x 760 cm, The Tate Gallery (Bequeathed by J.W. Freshfield 1955), London. © The Tate Gallery and Photographic Rights © Tate…