I cherish my three-day visual feast in Musée du Louvre in the first year of this millennium. However, 17 years later, this place, and together with Musée d’Oseay, the most important center of impressionism, have today become so crowded of tourists that they really discourage a visit for examining the art work in details. Nonetheless, there are over a hundred other museums in Paris, not nearly so jammed by tourists. Augmented by their changing exhibitions, they are our virtually inexhaustible resources.

Petit Palais

In October of 2017, we visited Petit Palais, famed for temporary fine art exhibitions, although it has its permanent collection. Built between 1897 and 1900, it is in the Beaux-Arts style, a pinnacle school of the western architecture which gathered most great fruits of thousands of years of its development. The beauty of the palace is unspeakable.

This time there were two temporary exhibits.

The first was Swedish Artist Anders Leonard Zorn (1860-1920). This genius seems to have complete freedom in all the media, oil, watercolor, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, etc. His large-format watercolors are breathtaking, considering large sizes are a real challenge to watercolorists. His seascape or river scenes are especially a tour de force. From being ignorant of him, I immediately became his fan.

The following is an auto portrait of Zorn with his wife, etching, 1890. (The green dot is a reflection of museum lighting by the anti-glare coated glass of the picture frame.)

Large-format watercolor “Wash of the ripples” below is obviously true to its name, focusing in the dazzling visual effect of the water. The figures are merely to add extra interests in the seascape and to display the painter’s well-rounded skills. Look at the subtle hues and rich play of colors in the water, the sky, and apron!

Pursuing plein air painting, capturing the true effect of natural light, was championed by the Impressionists. Zorn borrowed from them in this aspect. In fact, he surpassed them. His rendering of light is richer, truer, and chicer. Moreover, unlike the impressionists, he did not only capture the feelings of natural light while at the same time losing the rest of the heritage of western painting, i.e., pursuing beauty and richness in all other dimensions, such as proportion, tonal values, form, linear perspectives, anatomy, saturation of hues, aerial perspectives, edges, focal points, composition, narratives, texture, stroke styles, etc.

The next figure is his oil on canvas reflection (1889). The colors are rich yet not vulgar, the depth of the scene is strong, as if a window opened in front of the viewers, unlike most impressionist paintings, as flat as a wall blocking the view. His leaves are chic, some like bamboo leaves in some Chinese paintings, a rich gradation of values or hues done in one stroke of brush.

Zorn was also a master of portraiture. Many celebrities contracted him for their likeness. The following is a portrait of the King Oscar II of Sweden, 1898.

How to build a focal point at a given part of a picture? Some of the techniques well-known to painters are: maximizing the tonal contrast of that part, giving it the most saturated colors, placing the sharpest edges there, or using some strong lines (e.g., paths, river shores, or furrows of fields, etc.) to lead the view thereto. These tricks are, however, not appropriate for realistic indoor human form, which by nature does not have much high tonal contrast, bright hues, sharp edges. How did Zorn solve this problem? In the following oil on canvas In Wikström’s Studio, he does not exaggerate the body of the model, rather, he takes the advantage of the fact that there was not much colors in the sculptor’s studio and thus the moderate color of the nude stands out; moreover, he places sharp edges and high tonal contrasts all over the rest of the picture, which quickly cause the viewer much visual fatigue, so the eye naturally turns to the smooth and mid-toned flesh instead, if only for some comfort. What a surprising but brilliant strategy!

The second special exhibit in Le Petit Palais was Pastel: from Degas to Redon. (Pastel, dry sticks of pigment and chalk bound by minimum amount of resin, is not very well-known but handy tool especially for quickly recording artistic inspirations.) Considering that pastel paintings are relatively more easily damaged by lighting and vibrations than oils do, they are seldom on show in museums, and most never lent out by them. Therefore, it was a rare chance to see this exhibit.

Pastel paintings can be final works. The following Mademoiselle Ehrler by Léon Riesener (1851? 1861?) is an example.

Pastel works can be like colored drawings or sketches as preparation for the final picture in oil. The following is Berthe by Jacques Tissot (1882?), seemingly to mainly record the expressions of the hand and face, while quickly touching other parts.

No matter how quickly or shortly Tissot works on a piece, his accurate rendering of proportion, form, anatomy, light, texture, etc., seem to become his instincts. Only the master of these can hope to portray the most subtle psychological states. Tissot was reputed as a great social painter. His oil paintings the most beautiful, but moreover, immortalize the lives and fashions of his contemporary bourgeois class, with their flamboyant yet subtly boresome looks. This tour de force is beyond other artists. Tissot is one of my favorite painters.

Compared with Tissot’s work, the following Sara and her dog (1901) by Mary Cassatt, a major impressionist, seems somewhat mediocre: the viewer’s eye tends to wander all over the picture, searching hard for a focal point, but nowhere in it can offer a satisfying place for detailed examination. Also the form of the dog is weak, and the strokes are untidy, showing a lack of skill. As a final picture, the work seems lacking; but as a preparation for another painting, quite some energy seems spent unnecessarily on clothing.

Well, Paul Gauguin’s Sculptor Aubé and his son (1882) is even more unimpressive. Partially contiguous and partially discrete, is this one picture or two? Even the painter himself seems not sure. Does the composition hint that there is an alienation between the father and the son? The father’s proportion is almost of a dwarf’s, top of the head cut off, and the chin of the son seems missing. What is good about this painting? I guess its collection by the museum was mainly due to Gauguin’s fame as a “great modernist.”

Musée Cognacq-Jay

This museum was a bequest to the city of Paris by philanthropists Ernest Cognacq and his wife Marie-Louise Jaÿ. It is a rare kind: a mansion of bourgeois around the year of 1900, with their typical interior decoration, reflecting a then renewed interest of the fashion of the 18^th century. Almost all the collections of paintings, sculptures, furniture, and other objects of art are from that era.

Nearly all the paintings and sculpture are of small format. The furniture is in general also delicate. Added to these are the numerous broches, decorative boxes, snuff bottles, china, and other curios. Fortunately there were very few visitors in the museum, otherwise it would be very hard to examine these cute items up-close. They reminded me of a famous phrase “small is beautiful” (Leopold Kohr). On the contrary, modernist arts tend to grow larger and larger in size, probably because without the overwhelming effect, they would have nothing else of interest.

The Cognacq couple had an extraordinary business career, developing from a street peddler selling table cloth under a bridge to the owner of the famous department store La Samaritaine (Its revenue in 1925 was 1,000,000,000 francs. It is said that they were the inventors of price tag, catalogue sale, and clothing trials. Without offspring, their wealth mostly became donations to the public.) They started to collect art in 1880, just as most nouveaux riches did, beginning with fashionable modernist, such as Monet. However, after 1885, they entered a circle of knowledgeable in art, which influenced their taste change to the 18^th century. They then remained connoisseurs of art from that enlightened age until the end of their lives in 1928.

In the book about this museum, Lumières by famous French designer Christian Lacroix, I read about an important cause of such fashion returning to the 18^th century, that was the books by the Goncourt Brothers. They were active in 1860-80, devoted in research and writing (history and novels) about the society in the 18^th century. They strove to be detailed and accurate. Wikipedia says, “In their volumes (e.g., Portraits intimes du XVIII siecle), they dismissed the vulgarity of the Second Empire in favour of a more refined age.” These naturalist writers seem so interesting that I will someday spend enough effort to read their books in the French original, just as I did some of Zola and Maupassant.