Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun


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Some years ago I came across this self-portrait of the French artist  Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun in the National Gallery (London). So captivated was I that as soon as I got home I got stuck into the sources. The owner of one website in particular had a scanned copy of a biography written by the art critic Haldane MacFall (of whom more here). The scan had not been edited at all and so contained a lot of scan artefacts and imperfections. I offered to correct it and did so, and a few weeks later sent him my HTML and text versions. 

The only reply I ever got from the website creator was that he couldn’t look it over just yet because he was going to Antarctica - which I thought was an extreme form of criticism -  but after a while I got over it, assumed he’d fallen into a crevasse, dumped my efforts to Google Drive or whatever it was called then, and forgot about it.

Anyway, here it is . I don’t know if he took on my changes, or did his own, or just left it, because I’ve just read my version and I don’t have the energy to read it again just yet. But enjoy MacFall’s unique style and enjoy  Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun ‘s marvellous portraits.

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Manhole Covers

All those years ago I tried to tell you that manhole covers were interesting. I was Japanese at heart it seems. See?