My Favorite Paintings at Église Saint-Sulpice, Paris

Old European churches are often art treasure troves and Église Saint-Sulpice in Paris is just on of such amazing institutions. 

According to Wikipedia, at 113 metres long, 58 metres in width and 34 metres tall, it is only slightly smaller than Notre-Dame and thus the second largest church in the city. It is dedicated to Sulpitius the Pious. During the 18th century, an elaborate gnomon (part of a sundial that casts the shadow), the Gnomon of Saint-Sulpice, was constructed in the church.

Many people learned of this cathedral through Dan Brown's bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, while I through a French opera, Jules Massenet's Manon. In both works, pivotal scenes took place in this cathedral, therefore it earned a few paragraphs before I narrate on my favorite paintings it housed.



The above pictures showed the interior of the church and the gnomon (in the background) and the brass line on the floor.  You can see the detail of the gnomon in the larger picture below:



Constructed by the English clock-maker and astronomer Henry Sully, the gnomon was also used for various scientific measurements: This rational use may have protected Saint-Sulpice from being destroyed during the French Revolution.

The sight of this gnomon in the obelisk shape was unusual but it couldn't hold my interest long and soon I wandered away to see many magnificent stained glasses and then, in the Chapel of the Holy Angels, some unforgettable mural paintings by Eugène Delacroix, who painted scenes from The Bible, in the effort to repair the extensive damages the church suffered during the Revolution.  

My favorite mural there was the Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, dynamic in composition, romantic in scene setting and the result was both somewhat unsettling and absolutely beautiful.





My second favorite painting in Saint-Sulpice was St Michael defeats the Devil, again by Delacroix.  This painting had the similar atmosphere and dynamism as Wrestling.  The major difference was that St Michael was mounted on the ceiling therefore the St Michael's triumph was presented as a brilliant celestial vision and his victory had a cosmic feeling versus the more intimate and personal one of the Wrestling.  The colors in this painting was more brilliant and the Archangel occupied the absolute center of the painting, being the unchallenged center focus of this celebratory and lovely painting.

My Favorite Museum Collection Series

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List of My Favorite Artworks in the Museums I've Visited

Other Related posts on Art · 文化 · Kunst:
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- Musée de Cluny - Musée national du Moyen Âge, Paris
- Travel Inspired Paintings
- Get Ready for the Treasures from Musée d’Orsay
- Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris - De Young Museum, San Francisco
- Birth of Impressionism at De Young Museum, San Francisco

My Favorite Paintings at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam hosted numerous paintings by the great modern Dutch master, Vincent Van Gogh, from iconic ones to the somewhat lesser known though not minor ones.  After some difficult dideliberation, I chose below two paintings as my favorites.

The first one, Wheatfield with Crow, was a well known one, if not universally loves as his Irises or Starry Night. This painting, painted near the end of Van Gogh's life, was a pictorial cry of unmitigatable despair and looming doom, albeit an astonishingly beautiful one.  This visionary work reflected a tortured mind at the brink of collapse, and cracked open a door toward a dark world most of us could only project but not able to imagine and endure.  It was startling and one could practically hear the wailing of the crows filling up the dense blue sky.

Van Gogh, despite or because of his misery, weaved a magic spell with intense and strongly contrasted, thickly applied paints, in wavy and parallel brushstrokes, and it was really the trembling of his own sense and soul we discern.


Korenveld met kraaien, Wheatfield with Crow, Vincent van Gogh (1890) 
Oil on Canvas, 50.5 x 103 cm, 
Photo courtesy by Pachango on Flickr

The second work I cite below was a very tranquil one, comparing to the one above, with a serene and translucent beauty.


Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, 1888 Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) 
Oil on Canvas, 65 x 81.5 cm, 
Photo courtesy by Pachango on Flickr

This painting was painted during his stay in Arles, France, not far from the Mediterranean, after his visiting of the fishing village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in June 1888.  He captured something fragile which was deeply personal.  The color scheme was less brilliant than usual, and the brush strokes more continuous and less nervous.  The pale blue sea and beige sand gave this oil painting a look of more delicate pastel painting.  Yet, it was not a weak one.  There were bold strokes, manifested by the strongly outlined boats and their saturate colors, small patches but intense.  More over, the sky was painted with little strokes which invoked some uncertainty, some fearful anticipation, perhaps, an approaching storm.



My Favorite Museum Collection Series

>> My Favorite Museum Collection Series 52: My Favorite Paintings at Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, Netherlands  
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List of My Favorite Artworks in the Museums I've Visited

One Percent in Medieval Europe

One percent and the rest 99 percent have been in the news often lately but it is still hard for one group to image the lifestyle of the other.  What would we say of the 1% population in the US?  What do they own?  What do they do?  Investors/gamblers?  Entertainers?  Athletes?  I could never image what they do in their own time.  The divide was too wide to see across.

However, I got a glimpse of those one percent in medieval France.  Reading "A Distant Mirror - The Calamitous 14th Century" by Barbara W. Tuchman, I encountered a paragraph describing the group people on top of the economical/social ladder:

Not all nobles were grands seigneurs like the Coucys[1].  A bachelor knight, possessor of one manor and a bony nag, shared the same cult but not the interests of a territorial lord.  The total ranks of the nobility in France numbered about 200,000 persons in 40,000 to 50,000 families who represented something over one percent of the population.

The total population of the US today is 312,795,638 (U.S. Census Bureau estimate, 3 January 2012).  Therefore, the 1% of the US population is about 312,800 and if we used the same household size as used by Tuchman, we had 62,560 to 78,200 household in the top 1%.

However, I was not comfortable with that estimate because the household number was decidedly smaller nowadays.  In order to be more accurate, I did more search online and compiled some information here:

CNN Money said that "there were just under 1.4 million households that qualified for entry. They earned nearly 17% of the nation's income and paid roughly 37% of its income tax.  Collectively, their adjusted gross income was $1.3 trillion. And while $343,927 was the minimum AGI to be included, on average, Top 1-percenters made $960,000."

Washington Post had such analysis:

Taken literally, the top 1 percent of American households had a minimum income of $516,633 in 2010 — a figure that includes wages, government transfers and money from capital gains, dividends and other investment income.

That number is down from peak of $646,195 in 2007, before the economic crisis hit, all adjusted to 2011 dollars, according to calculations by the Tax Policy Center. By contrast, the bottom 60 percent earned a maximum of $59,154 in 2010, the bottom 40 percent earned a max of $33,870, while the bottom 20 percent earned just $16,961 at maximum. As Annie Lowrey points out, that gap has grown wider over time: “The top 1 percent of households took a bigger share of overall income in 2007 than they did at any time since 1928.” (And in New York City, it’s even more skewed: the top 1 percent have an average of $3.7 million in income.)

When you look at the disparity in net worth, things look even more skewed. Wealthier Americans have assets — in home equity, stocks and other investments — that generally outstrip their cash income. Average wealth of the top 1 percent was almost $14 million in 2009, according to a 2011 report from the Economic Policy Institute. That’s down from a peak of $19.2 million in 2007.

By contrast, the poorest households were experiencing declines in net worth even before the recession hit. In 2007, the bottom 20 percent of households had an average (negative!) net worth of –$13,800 in 2007, which fell further to –$27,200 in 2009. Altogether, “average wealth of the bottom 80 percent was just $62,900 in 2009 — a dropoff of $40,900 from 2007,” EPI writes. That means the wealthiest 1 percent held an average of 225 times the wealth of the average median household in 2009 — a ratio that was 125 in 1962.

In this advance e- or i- age, the people who sit at the bottom of social and economical ladder may not look and work like dumb beasts literally as in the Middle Age, but their miseries are not dissimilar to those in the medieval time.

The misery of those poor people in the Dark Age were exacerbated by the nobles who disregarded their "social contract".  According to Tuchman in her book, "the object of the noble's function, in theory, was not fighting for fighting's sake, but defense of the two other estates and the maintenance of justice and order.  He was supposed to protect the people from oppression, to combat tyranny, and to cultivate virtue - that is, the higher qualities of humanity of which the mud-stained ignorant peasant was considered incapable by his contemporaries in Christianity, if not by its founder."

I am not championing the absolute wealth equality.  Rather, I want to point out that the rich have many social obligations as those nobles in the medieval time.  They need to care for and protest the poor, to defend civil liberty and oppose political and religious persecution and promote art and literature, etc.  Our one-percenters have failed rather terribly just as the latter-day knights and the nobles.  And we know what happened to them eventually when their greed became utterly uncontainable.



Image source: Wikipedia, courtesy of CJ DUB 

[1] Coucy was in the forefront of action, tied as he was to both France and England. Coucy was a French noble, but he married Isabella, the eldest daughter of Edward III of England. - Wikipedia

Pompidou-Metz

The iconic art museum - Centre Georges Pompidou just opened a branch at Metz, a northeastern French city. President Nicolas Sarkozy opened the new museum on 11 May.

According to Guardian report, Sarkozy hailed a renaissance of one of France's most overlooked regions today as he inaugurated the Centre Pompidou Metz, the first regional outpost of Paris's landmark gallery and a project expected to give a much-needed boost to the north-eastern Lorraine.

The new building is a glorious art work it self, and earned an affectionate nickname as "Magic Lantern". It does glow like an Arab artifacts. The building, designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and his French colleague Jean de Gastines, with its undulating roof, looks not unlike an adoring dwelling for the Hobbits.

Guardian continued: "Metz, a military city long fought over by France and Germany, is located in an unglamorous part of the country and is expected to be hit hard by cuts to the armed forces brought in by Sarkozy's government. Although connected since 2007 by high-speed rail to the capital in 80 minutes, it has yet to experience the TGV 'electroshock' from which other French cities have benefited."

"For its inaugural exhibition, entitled Chefs-d'oeuvre? – Masterpieces? – director Laurent Le Bon has acquired around 700 works from its sister gallery and dozens from other institutions in an exploration of what constitutes a masterpiece. Paintings by Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky and Miro are amongst those on display. One, Henri Matisse's final self-portrait called La Tristesse du Roi, was transported to Metz despite its great fragility and value."

Travel Inspired Paintings

I'm about to travel for a while. While making preparations, I remembered many trips I took before, particularly with the purpose of sightseeing, and the works I produced afterwards:





















Rape Fields (Yangtze Delta, China, 1991)























Street Scene, Roma (Rome, Italy - Italy, France 2000)























Venice (Venice, Italy - Italy, France 2000)























Via Italia (Italy - Italy, France 2000)























Woods (Italy - Italy, France 2000)



















La Seine, I (Paris, France - Italy, France 2000)






















La Seine, II (Paris, France - Italy, France 2000)






















A Young Frenchman (Paris, France - Italy, France 2000)






















Winter Flowers (Shenyang, China - 2003)



















Bruges, Impression (Bruges, Belgium - UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, 2004)


















Sediment (Beijing, China - 2005)













Beyond (Chengdu, China - Chengdu, Three Gorges, Xi'an and Xianyang 2007)






















Orange Parisian (Paris, France - 2008)