Morning all. 5.8
Monet exhibition at the Courtauld yesterday was beyond breathtaking. I’m not a huge Monet fan but having 21 of his Thames Views paintings hanging in the same intimate space was amazing. That man sure could paint.
Opera in the evening was also a win. Puccini wrote it as one of a triple bill that would be presented as a tryptic in a single performance but here it’s just Suor Angelica that’s being staged. It’s gut wrenching intense and it was only 55 minutes from start to finish. Cast were resting for an hour and then they were doing a second performance!
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Monet basically lived at the Savoy and passed the view from his balcony and other places around the river. None of the paintings were completed in situ but he’d take the unfinished canvases home and finish them there, sometimes ten years after starting.
He said that he could only paint for about 5 minutes a time in London as it would always rain but the thing he loved most was the fog as it would make the buildings into mysterious shrouded shapes.
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This one is the one I’d have gladly tagged home with me. It stopped me in my tracks and I just stood there in front of it for easily twenty minutes. I even had a tear running down my cheek at one point. It’s just so so beautiful even if not “pretty”.
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No problems seeing or hearing anything from this seat!
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