#paris

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.

This one started out with a plainer name — something like 'In a Café' — before the nickname it's known by now took over, from what I can find.

For a stretch in the early 1890s he more or less moved into the brothels off the Paris boulevards and painted the women there off duty rather than working — sleeping, dressing, waiting about. This is one of that run, done on cardboard rather than canvas from what I can find.

Delaunay painted the Eiffel Tower more than two dozen times, splitting it into fragments and colour rather than showing it whole.

He liked painting Paris from a window looking down like this — a habit he supposedly kept up for years. He got lumped in with the 'Fauves' at the scandal-causing show of 1905, though you'd never call this one wild or loud.

The tower was brand new when this was painted, and a good chunk of Paris couldn't stand it — a few hundred writers and architects signed an open letter calling it a monstrosity, and the whole thing was only meant to stand about twenty years. Worth knowing this is a tiny painting too, roughly the size of a sheet of paper, according to what I could find.

According to what I've read, he'd left America for Paris and stayed for good — supposedly he said he couldn't fight prejudice and paint at the same time. This was apparently a view close to where he lived, done small.

The crowd is apparently packed with people he actually knew — family, writers, musicians, himself tucked in at one edge — put together from sketches made at open-air concerts. Critics at the time complained it looked slapped on rather than finished.

I couldn't find much on him — apparently he helped start a painters' group back in Rouen, and had a rough life, in and out of hospitals. That's about all there is.

The cabaret had only just opened when this was painted, and he did a whole run of pictures of the place. Someone apparently found writing on the back explaining that the man is teaching a new girl the steps — the dancer went by the nickname 'the Boneless'. The crowd is said to be full of actual regulars, his own father among them.

He had rooms looking straight out at this view and painted it again and again across the years, from what I've read. This is one of the earlier goes, well before the colour got loud.

Apparently he painted this corner of Paris again and again — sometimes, they say, working from postcards rather than standing in the street. He'd been pushed into painting as a cure for drinking, according to what I've read, and it stuck better than the cure did.