Art.

The world is a museum and Paris is just one of its paintings filled with gardens, mirrors, stained glass, cathédrales, cobblestone, architecture, and much more.

Week one of my Paris journey consisted of my favorite art medium: paintings! My week was filled with art from Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Vincent Van Gogh, Berthe Morisot, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Edgar Degas… to name a few. The Musee Dʻorsay is overflowing with a rich collection of impressionist art. The current highlight collection features Edvard Munch: Un poème de vie, d’amour et de mort. A poem of life, love and death.

Louvre:

Le Choses: Things, The Story of Still Life an exhibition made by Laurence Bertrand Dorléac who thought to bring together still life from across the globe and time periods in order to amplify the link between inanimate objects and our thoughts.

Memento Mori:

An ongoing theme evident throughout European art is Memento Mori which in Latin translates to "Have in mind, at the thought that [you are dying]...", which means to say "Remember that you are dying" and in French is "Remember that you are going to die.” This memento serves as a reminder to remember that one day you will die so live a life worth living. In the paintings above, small tokens of this idea is the skulls in the painting Vanity by Franciscus Gijsbrechts and in the painting to the right by Luis Egidio Melénde show rotting watermelons and apples. These underlying motifs portray the lifestyle the French hold.