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Originally the barmaid’s face was supposed to be more expressive of what she was really set on selling. While painting, Manet changed his mind and made the barmaid look bored and tired or professionally impassive.  

My friend, Seurat, and I  were often together  at la Grand Jatte. He was sketching, I was taking photos. Often  our mutual friend, the writer Emile Zola, would join us. Like Seurat, Zola looked for inspiration among the representatives of various classes, who gathered at La Grande Jatte. Many passers-by […]

Manet’s model for Nana was the actress Henrietta Hauser. The painter liked his models so much that he made another painting of Henriatta Hauser in the same blue corset. That painting is exhibited in Germany under the title Frau vor dem Spiegel. Below are the model and the painting.  

The primary function of underwear is utilitarian. Underwear keeps us warm, keeps away the bodily fluids from the outerwear and protects the body from the maybe coarse material of the upper garments. Underwear also has an erotic function but there were stages in its development when underwear was less than […]

The painters take really looked like this: Ophelia was not singing while she was drowning. She was just serene in the midst of all the marsh muck.

Elisabeth Taylor’s close-up in one of her early movies as a grown-up: The Father of the Bride. Batterfield 8.

The little village of Argenteuil by the Seine, easily reached from Paris by train, was a favourite of the Impressionists. They painted scenes of the changing outdoors and of  people in that relaxing ambiance.   The couple on the painting does not look happy and relaxed. Each of them seems […]

Dr Bovary on  his way to see a patient.His wife, Emma, was “educated” on schmaltz. She refused to accept that reality cannot even approach her romantic expectations of life. The end had to be tragic.