Paris the Louvre ...Lunch with Nellie

The Louvre

When you think museums in Paris or (musee' as the french say) The first place that comes to mind is the Louvre home of Mona Lisa and  Venus de Milo among many other famous works of art. You need days to really see everything. On my first visit I was exhausted  my senses overloaded. I was trying to see every thing not knowing if I would ever be back. Disappointed- I  had just fought the crowds to get a glimpse of the Mona Lisa.... the painting was so small and you couldn't even get very close for the people and ropes,plus it was behind bullet proof glass. I wandered away up some stairs totally lost ..turned a corner and there she was my black Mona Lisa. The portrait d'une negresse she seem to be looking straight at me just hanging there on the wall unprotected...I could of reach out and touched her( don't worry they have guards posted every few yards ..so no sane person would dare)

I am having a hard time trying to write why I really liked this painting. I guess with art you just know what you like. The expression on her face ..I really can't make up my mind..Is she bored, sad, happy, mad, content. It seems to change.. maybe with my mood. I went to the Louvre bookstore and bought a print. Across for the bookstore is a post office right in the museum.  I bought a mailing tube and had the print shipped home. Nelli as I call her is now framed and hangs in my living room. I did research but except for the fact that some think she might have been a slave from the island of Martinique ..no one really know anything about her life.

I have been back many times.... to have .....as I call it lunch with Nelli . The Louver has a wonderful mall with a food court.  I go get something to eat ..visit shop called Fragonard Parfumeur  (a French perfume company) I buy a candle and some soap.  Then I go visit Nelli .... it has been a while since my last visit.  Nelli I hope I will be able to drop by and visit on my  way to Timbuktu for my 50th birthday.

If you plan on going to the Louvre here are some tips. 

1.Don't try to see everything at once. Get a guide book decide what you really must see. Stop and enjoy each piece of art on your list.

Crowds @ Mona Lisa

2 . Do eat at the food court. Food can  be very expensive  in Paris , but  you will find the food there reasonably priced.

3. Wear a comfortable pair of shoes.  Even though you can wear sweats and tennis shoes..why not dress it up a little..try and look chic. After all you are in Paris. Remember you are seeing history and making memory's..don't you want to look good in your pictures. You don't want to look like the frumpy  American tourist :-)

Venus de Milo 

3. Spend the money and hire a personal guide. The museum or hotel  concierge  can recommend one. You can let the guide know what art you must see.  They will work with you  to make sure you see it and show you  things that you didn't know you wanted to see. A good guide will actually save you time because don't waste time wandering around looking for an exhibit. Yes the museum will have group tours,but I would personally splurge on a private guide. They really are not that much more  especially if you split the cost with friends.

Portrait d'une négresse (1800) 

Hanging on one wall of the Musée du Louvre, in the company of the gargantuan machines by Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault, and others, is an exquisitely crafted and modestly sized painting of a black woman. She is shown seated, half-draped, with her right breast bared to the viewer. She sports an intricately wrapped and crisply laundered headdress that appears similar in fabric to the garment she gathers closely against her body just below her breasts. She stares out at the viewer with an enigmatic expression. Although there are no background details that indicate precisely where the sitter is placed, certain details of her physical surroundings—namely, the ancien régime chair and luxurious cloth that drapes both it and her—suggest that she is in a well-to-do domestic space.

Portrait d'une négresse was painted in 1800 by Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist (born Marie-Guillemine Leroulx-Delaville) (1768-1826), a woman of aristocratic lineage who belonged to a small elite circle of professional women painters that included, among others, Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818), Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755-1842), Marguerite Gérard (1771-1837), Angélique Mongez (1775-1855), and Adélaide Labille-Guiard (1749-1803).1 As had been the case with most women artists working at the time, Benoist fit the middle and upper class ideal of "womanhood" in her conforming to the social expectations of women to marry, raise children, and forego a career.

Although we do not know whether or to what extent Benoist partook in the volatile debates on slavery and gender current during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in France, her painting may be seen as a voice of protest, however small, in the discourse over human bondage.-James Smalls

Here are some of the most famous paintings that are in the Louvre:

• Leonardo da Vinci, The Mona Lisa (as noted above)
• David, The Oath of the Horatii between the Hands of their Father
• Delacroix, Dante and Virgil; Death of Sardanapalus
• Gericault, Raft of the Medusa
• Greuze, Betrothal in the Village
• Gros, Bonaparte Visiting the Victims of the Plague
• Ingres, Oedipus and the Sphinx; Valpincon Bather
• Prud'hon, Empress Josephine
• Quarton, Pieta de Villeneuve d'Avignon
• Ribera, The Club-Footed Boy
• Rigaud, Portrait of Louix XIV
• Rubens, The Disembarkation of Maria de' Medici at the Port of Marseilles
• School of Fountainebleau, Diana the Huntress
• Titian, Pastoral Concert
• Watteau, Embarkation for Cythera