#dog

The bridge is a real one, flung over the railway yards at a busy Paris station back when half the city was being torn up and rebuilt in iron and stone — from what I've read, that new metal city was the fashionable thing to paint at the time. He also had family money, and spent a good chunk of it buying up his friends' paintings; when he left the lot to the state there was apparently a long row about whether they'd even take it.

As the story goes, the original version of this dog was stolen right off this same spot, and what's standing here now is the replacement. According to Wikipedia, it's also one of only two standalone sculptures in the whole square.

The little girl in white is a Spanish princess, surrounded by her maids, a dog, and two court dwarfs who were apparently real people with names of their own, kept around for entertainment — which reads differently now than it must have then. There's also a small mirror on the back wall that, from what I can tell, reflects the king and queen, apparently right about where they'd have been standing to watch all this get painted.

This was the last in a run of seven portraits the same painter made of her over the years. It hung at Versailles first, then apparently passed down to her brother.

These weren't painted on canvas at all — they went straight onto the plaster walls of the house he was living in, and from what I can find nobody thinks they were meant for anyone else to see. They got cut off the walls and stuck onto canvas decades later, which supposedly explains why they look this rubbed-out and battered.