I forgot to post this! I posted on the Inspired by Reading Facebook site, but completely forgot to blog about it!
I had already listened to this book on cd twice. Plus read her first novel The Historian. I loved them. Very long, but keeps your interest. Since it had been a while since I read it, I thought I would do some projects on the IDEAS that she used to tell the story.
Étretat, Normandy Coast, France was called "the beach of artists and writers" in the late nineteenth century. Gustave Courbet, Eugene Boudin, and Claude Monet to name a few.
In the winter of 1868-1869 Monet's attention was drawn to Etretat in the Caux region of Normandy. He then returned there every year between 1883 and 1886. Like many painters, particularly Gustave Courbet, Monet was captivated by the picturesque qualities of the place, and took inspiration from it for more than fifty of his paintings.
The configuration of "these high cliffs pierced by these strange arches called the Gates" (Maupassant, Adieu, 1884) gives an unusual character to the landscape. The largest of the three openings in the cliffs, the Manneporte, "an enormous vault through which a liner could pass" (Maupassant, Guillemot Rock, 1882), appears in only two of Monet's paintings. This work can be dated 1885, by analogy with another painting of equal size, signed and dated 1885: The Manneport, Etretat in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
I fell in love with this one of the series...
Here are a few more...
Here's my necklace to represent Monet's cliffs at sunset...
The Leda with the Swan is a DeviantArt piece I found while researching...
I already commented on Facebook, but just wanted to say again how much I enjoyed your pieces and inspiration. Thanks for sharing the paintings of the cliffs at Etretat!
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