Charing Cross (London)

Charing Cross denotes the junction of Strand, Whitehall and Cockspur Street, just south of Trafalgar Square. It is named after the Eleanor Cross that once stood in the hamlet of Charing. In 1290, Eleanor of Castile, the wife of Edward I had died at Harby in Nottinghamshire. The places where her body rested on the journey south to its tomb in Westminster Abbey were each marked by stone crosses. The site of the Charing cross is now occupied by an equestrian statue of Charles I.

There are countless paintings and drawings of Charing Cross and its famous bridge. The view produced by one artist, however, has become iconic. When Claude Monet visited London in 1870 he became intrigued by the metropolis. Capturing its muted colours and moisture-laden atmosphere became a challenge he was not ready to risk as yet. His desire to paint these distinctive effects of light and tonal nuance was rekindled three decades later when he travelled to London later to visit his son Michel in the autumn of 1899. The sight of the city’s buildings looming in the fog inspired him to return the following year. He painted boats on the Thames from a position on the Charing Cross Bridge as well as the massive silhouette of the Houses of Parliament in every conceivable weather condition. He struggled to capture what he saw, working on as many as fifteen canvases at a time. Monet painted his ‘Charing Cross Bridge’ in 1900. This view of the bridge, with its misty atmosphere and the merest suggestion of shapes for the boats on the water, recalls earlier and pioneering work. His ‘Waterloo Bridge’, painted in the same year, is an evocative portrayal of London’s infamous overcast climate in which the artist restricted his palette to a range of blues, modulated with yellow into green, in a dramatic expression of obscured light.

In his letters from London, Monet often complained about the English weather. The fog, the rain, and the damp all threatened to impede his progress, and he often worked in his hotel room, looking out the window. But the volatility of the weather also inspired him. He set out to capture every type of weather in paint, including his 1903 work ‘Pont de Waterloo, Jour Gris’. His 1903 foggy image of ‘Les maisons de Parliament’ was part of a series that had to be completed from memory rather than observation. Illness had cut short this, his third London campaign. In 1900, Claude Monet pushed himself to the point of collapse, and, in the following year, a severe bout of pleurisy forced him to cut his work short and return to Giverny. It was during this spell of physical recovery that he started his famous series (nearly 100 canvases) of water lilies floating in his pond.

Maintaining this Continental focus, Charing Cross appears in a significant manner in Ford Madox Ford’s modernist war poem ‘Antwerp’ (published in January 1915). Previously, just before entering World War I where he served as a Lieutenant until he was sent home following shell shock at the battle of the Somme, Ford had published his novel The Good Soldier. His Antwerp poem was inspired by the blackness of his experiences during the war. It was considered by T.S. Eliot to be the only good poem he knew on the subject of war. Ford, weary of English life, eventually settled in France where he founded The Transatlantic Review. He made Ernest Hemingway assistant editor, and they published authors such as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Rhys. Between the years 1924 and 1928, he published his four-volume novel, Parade’s End. The poet published ‘Antwerp’ under his real name of Ford Madox Hueffer. Son of a German journalist and music critic, he anglicized his name to Ford Madox Ford only after the war at the behest of his publisher.

An early episode in the war was the siege of Antwerp in the north of Belgium by the German Army. Ford’s poem deals with the desperation of Belgian resistance against the German invasion. It opens with these powerful lines:

Gloom!
An October like November;
August a hundred thousand hours,
And all September,
A hundred thousand, dragging sunlit days,
And half October like a thousand years …
And doom!
That then was Antwerp …

To describe Belgian heroism, Ford uses parallels with the heroes of Greek or Norse legend. The final verses of the poem move the reader from occupied Antwerp to Charing Cross and the nightmare spectacle of Belgian refugees. In September 1914 the British government had offered ‘victims of war the hospitality of the British nation’, accepting the responsibility for the reception, maintenance and registration of Belgian refugees, while at the same time sought out assistance in housing the refugees with local authorities. British Naval Brigades were sent to Antwerp to the relief and evacuation of the city. It meant the beginning of an influx of refugees from Belgium. Charing Cross was the station where these refugees arrived in large numbers, frightened women, childrenand elederly people in desperate circumstances carrying their tiny bundles belongings done up in handkerchiefs. Ford paints a painful picture of the conditions awaiting those who had fled their home and country:

This is Charing Cross;
It is one o’clock.
There is still a great cloud, and very little light;
Immense shafts of shadows over the black crowd
That hardly whispers aloud….
And now!… That is another dead mother,
And there is another and another and another….
And little children, all in black,
All with dead faces, waiting in all the waiting-places,
Wandering from the doors of the waiting-room
In the dim gloom.
These are the women of Flanders:
…

There is another strong reminder of the unfortunate role Charing Cross played during World War I. John Hodgson Lobley was official war artist to the Royal Army Medical Corps. Nowadays we send photographers to the front. During the Great War artists were commissioned to leave their impressions to posterity. In his capacity as war artist Lobley created 120 paintings, many of which are owned by London’s Imperial War Museum. These include scenes of rehabilitation in Queens Hospital for Facial Injuries in Sidcup (opened in 1917 thanks to the initiative of otolaryngologist Harold Gillies: more than 11,000 operations were performed on over 5,000 soldiers with facial injuries from gunshot wounds) ; of the Royal Army Medical Corps in training; and of casualty clearing stations near battlefields in France, including Douai. Probably the most famous of Lobley’s images is the 1918 oil on canvas painting entitled ‘Outside Charing Cross Station, July 1916: Casualties from the Battle of the Somme Arriving in London’.

Boulevard des Italiens (Paris)

The Boulevard des Italiens is one of the four grand avenues in Paris (the others are Boulevard de la Madeleine, Boulevard des Capucines and Boulevard Montmartre). Originally the term boulevard referred to a bulwark or rampart of a fortified town; hence, a street occupying the site of demolished fortifications. The word was derived from the Middle Dutch bolwerk (bulwark or bastion). The name points the Théâtre des Italiens which was built there in 1783, shortly before the French Revolution (now replaced by the Opéra-Comique). Under the second Bourbon Restoration it was known as the Boulevard de Gand in memory of Louis XVIII’s exile in Ghent during the Hundred Days War. Throughout the nineteenth century and up to World War I the boulevard was a meeting place for the elegant elite of Paris.

The streets of Paris underwent remarkable changes in the 1820s. The existing cobblestones were covered with bitumen pavements to make them more pleasant to walk and easier to maintain, and to prevent rebels from using the cobblestones to make blockades. In addition, gas lights were installed which created a new and exciting atmosphere, that of ‘la ville lumière’ in the making. They lined the streets, illuminating them throughout the night. Cafés and restaurants were brightly lit. Their large plate-glass windows seem to open up the inner city. The terraces were full of relaxed clients watching the world go by. The light of the gas lamps enabled them to socialize late at night. In 1842, such an image was captured by Eugène Lami in his painting ‘Le Boulevard des Italiens, la nuit, à l’angle de la Rue Lafitte’. Showing the intersection of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue Lafitte, it depicts affluent Parisians out on the streets during the evening. Not long afterwards Lami’s popular view was made into a colour litho by E. Radclyffe. Many artists were inspired by the lively atmosphere of the Boulevard. In 1880, Gustave Caillebotte created an ‘aerial’ view of ‘Le Boulevard des Italiens’.

Édouard Léon Cortès, a French post-impressionist artist of French and Spanish ancestry, was known as ‘Le Poète Parisien de la Peinture’ because of his beautiful cityscapes in a variety of weather and night settings. His first exhibition in 1901 brought him immediate recognition. He depicted the Boulevard des Italiens in a number of atmospheric paintings. In 1897, Camille Pissarro painted the Boulevard in the morning sunlight and called the work ‘Boulevard des Italiens, matin, soleil’. The painting was acquired by Chester Dale who, upon his death in 1962, bequeathed the core of his impressive French art collection to the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

After the July Revolution of 1850 the cityscape of Paris began to express its bourgeois prosperity in which the young played a leading role. The archetypal denizen of the modern boulevard was a flâneur, a man (always, a man) of sophistication and elegance who scanned the activity around him with detachment. Baudelaire cast the artist in the role of flâneur, a detective who could decipher the codes of a new urban experience. The boulevards were filled with aristocrats, diplomats, artists, and dandies, who gathered in fashionable establishments such as the Café de Paris, the Café Anglais, Maison Dorée, and above all at Tortoni’s. Founded in 1798 by a Neapolitan immigrant named Velloni as a café-pâtisserie and extended by Giuseppe Tortoni, the Café Tortoni became the establishment where the elite of Parisian society would meet in the nineteenth century. In the morning, stockbrokers breakfasted there; late in the afternoon, artists sipped absinthe; and at night tout le monde went to Tortoni’s for his famous ice creams. Some of its artistically refined clients soon came to be referred to as ‘dandies’ or more locally as ‘tortonistes’. Composer Offenbach, poet Alfred de Musset, novelists Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue, the Goncourt Brothers, Lord Henry Seymour, and Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, author of Du dandysme et de George Brummell, were all regular visitors to the café. Balzac often mentions Tortoni in his novels; the café is described by Alfred de Musset; the famous billiard room on the second floor appears in Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir; and Proust points on several occasions to Tortoni’s in À la recherché du temps terdu. Sénécal, in Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale (1869), kills Dussardier on the steps of Café Tortoni.

There are several depictions of the café, all confirming its reputation as a fashionable establishment. In his from his 1856 series of lithographs entitled Physionomies de Paris Eugène Charles François Guérard, an artist of whom few biographical details are known, shows an image of ‘Le Boulevard des Italiens, devant Tortoni à quatre heures du soir’. The scene is outside the café, where patrons crowd the sidewalk. Men, all in top hats and frock coats dominate the mass of people. An image of the café itself was provided in an oil painting by Jean Béraud, another artist who specialized in the depiction of daily Parisian life, which he titled ‘Le Boulevard devant le Café Tortoni’. Édouard Manet felt particularly at home in this café where he frequently lunched. He was more a dandy than a bohemian. His top hat and waistcoat blended in splendidly with the patrons of Tortoni’s. In 1878/80 he created a painting of a jaunty gentleman in a top hat in the act of writing (a letter or a novel?) which he gave the title of ‘Chez Tortoni’.

The origin of the word dandy is uncertain. Eccentricity, defined as taking characteristics such as dress and appearance to extremes, began to be applied in the 1770s. Similarly, the word dandy first appears in the late eighteenth century. A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and cultivated wit. In most cases of middle-class background, he strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle. The model dandy in British society was George Bryan ‘Beau’ Brummell in his early days, an undergraduate student at Oriel College, Oxford, and later, an associate of the Prince Regent. In 1799, upon coming of age, Brummell – although not from an aristocratic background – inherited from his father a fortune of thirty thousand pounds, which he squandered on costume, gambling, and high living. His snobbery was one of style and fashion. The new development in fashion he started off was in his perfect plainness. His understated elegance and refinement set the standard in masculine dress. To a world in which dress was dictated by wealth and display, he brought a new ethic of restraint. His mode of masculine dress reflected the neo-classical ideals in art and architecture of the day. It was based upon his interpretation of Greek masculine beauty. The best known image of Brummell is a watercolour produced by the prolific London portrait artist Richard Dighton.

Although Lord Byron considered Brummel the most influential character of the nineteenth century after Napoleon, Romanticism created a different image of the dandy. The romantic pose was always to appear at ease, but it was a casualness that was as painstakingly cultivated as the outward perfection of the dandy. The romantics wore their collars unbuttoned to show their pale chests. Broad brimmed hats kept their white complexions away from the sun. Byron, in order to conceal his club-foot, wore loose trousers, an innovation that would become a ‘must’ among his followers soon after. In France, from the 1750s onwards, the English were much admired in certain (aristocratic) circles. The number of French visitors to England increased substantially and many travellers published an account of their journey. English novels were popular in translation. Voltaire had paid tribute to the English political system; the French admired the horse racing culture in England; their aristocracy drank ‘ponche’, and dined on ‘rosbif’ and ‘pouding’. After the defeat of Napoleon, both English dandyism and Romanticism struck Paris like lightning. The French adopted the figure of the dandy and made him their own. French dandyism however took on a different direction. The Bourgeois Revolution of 1830 had an effect of idealizing practicality, economy and efficiency. In rebellion, Parisian artists and poets adopted dandiacal dress and haughty manners. They created a bohemian ‘aristocracy’ rejecting and mocking bourgeois society. Barbey d’Aurevilly intellectualized the dandy and identified dandyism with the battle against vulgarity. Writers such as Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and J.K. Huysmans enhanced the status of the dandy by giving him a spiritual mission. Dandyism was defined as the outward manifestation of inner perfection.

Tortoni’s at the Boulevard des Italiens closed in 1893. The famous name however was not lost. In 1858 a French immigrant in Buenos Aires named Touan opened a coffeehouse at no. 825 Avenida de Mayo. He called the establishment Café Tortoni. Nostalgia no doubt. The café recreated the atmosphere of the Parisian fin de siècle coffeehouse.

Boulevard Saint-Michel (Paris)

The Boulevard Saint-Michel is a major street in the Latin Quarter. It is a tree-lined boulevard which runs south from the Pont Saint-Michel on the Seine, crosses the Boulevard Saint-Germain and continues alongside the Sorbonne and the Luxembourg Gardens, ending at the Place Camille Jullian just before the Port-Royal train station. The boulevard was an important part of Haussmann’s renovation of Paris. As the central axis of the Left Bank and the university at its heart, the area is and has long been a centre of learning and culture, and a hotbed of student life and political activism. Initially known as Boulevard de Sébastopol Rive Gauche, construction of the boulevard was decreed in 1855 and began in 1860. The name was changed to Boulevard Saint-Michel in 1867.

The Boulevard Saint-Michel is connected with a literary group known as the ‘Vilains bonhommes’ (the ‘naughty fellows’ – a journalistic insult addressed against fellow poet François Coppée and taken as an honorary name). The authors met in a room on the third floor of the Hôtel des Étrangers, dining, drinking, smoking, reciting verse, and creating parodies of each other’s work and that of the Parnassiens (preferably in an obscene manner – young Rimbaud was a master in producing such rhymes). The result was a collection of poems published in the Album zutique. The hotel’s barman Ernest Cabaner was teaching piano to Rimbaud using chromaticism as a method, colouring notes and giving them the sound of a vowel (this was the immediate source of Rimbaud’s inspiration for the 1871 sonnet ‘Voyelles’ in which each vowel is assigned a colour which helped popularize synesthesia).

The Boulevard Saint-Michel has been the subject of a number of paintings. Jean-François Raffaëlli was a Parisian realist painter and printmaker who exhibited with the Impressionists. Until the mid-1870s he produced primarily costume pictures. His interest in the positivist philosophy of Taine led to a change in approach. Having articulated a theory of realism that he named ‘caractérisme’, he began depicting the people of his time, particularly peasants, workers, and rag pickers seen in the suburbs of Paris. His careful observation of man in his milieu paralleled the anti-aesthetic, anti-romantic approach of Naturalist novelists led by Émile Zola. Degas invited him to take part in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1880 and 1881, an initiative that bitterly divided the group. Not only was Raffaëlli not an Impressionist, but he threatened to dominate the 1880 exhibition with a staggering display of thirty-seven works. Monet, resentful of Degas’s insistence on expanding the Impressionist exhibitions by including several realists, refused to exhibit. After 1890, Raffaëlli shifted his attention from the suburbs to the inner city of Paris. The oil painting ‘Boulevard Saint-Michel’ (1890) is an example of that notable stylistic shift in his work.

Luigi Loir was one of the foremost painters of views of Paris and among the first artists to glamorize the urban lifestyle of the late nineteenth century. He was known as the ‘official painter of the Parisian Boulevards’. Amongst the many street paintings are the Boulevard Henri IV, Rue de la Santé, Le Val de Grâce, Quai Saint Michel, Quai des Augustins, Rond Point des Champs Élysées, Boulevard du Palais, and others. His interest in street scenes was influenced by a transformation that had entirely reshaped the urban landscape and the way in which Parisians spent their leisure time. The street itself became the centre of activity – from the bohemian centre of Montmartre to the upper class promenades of the leisure class. Loir’s cityscape is more than a simple depiction of Paris and its inhabitants. The artist was fascinated by the changing effects of both the different times of day and the varying weather conditions. Among the many street and boulevard scenes he created is a delightful oil painting of the Boulevard Saint-Michel in the early evening (he also produced a ‘Coin du Boulevard Saint-Michel’).

Peter Sarstedt is an Anglo-Indian singer and songwriter. Born in Delhi in 1941, the family returned to England thirteen years later. The singer hit the big time in 1969 with his song ‘Where Do You Go To (my Lovely)?’, a song about a fictional poor girl from the backstreets of Naples named Marie-Claire (it has been suggested that this is a reference to Sophia Loren) who grows up to become a member of the jet set. The lyrics describe her from the perspective of a childhood friend. The title suggests that wealth has not brought her happiness or contentment in life. The lyrics contain a set of international references to what was hot and fashionable in the late sixties and early seventies, from personalities such as Marlene Dietrich (actress and singer), Zizi Jeanmaire (ballerina), Pierre Balmain (designer), Sacha Distel (singer), the Aga Khan (racehorse owner who, in 1969, married the fashion model Sarah Croker-Poole), Picasso and The Rolling Stones, to exotic places like Juan-les-Pins (Riviera beach resort) and Saint Moritz (ski resort in the Alps). In 1969 the song was awarded the prestigious Ivor Novello Award presented by the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) – the writing community in other words. The two opening verses seem to justify John Peel’s comments on this song. In a New Musical Express interview, the legendary BBC disc jockey named the record as his personal worst of all time.

You talk like Marlene Dietrich
And you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire
Your clothes are all made by Balmain
And there’s diamonds and pearls in your hair, yes there are.

You live in a fancy apartment
Off the Boulevard Saint-Michel
Where you keep your Rolling Stones records
And a friend of Sacha Distel, yes you do.

Miodowa Street (Warsaw)

The historical part of Warsaw’s Old Town (Stare Miasto) dates back to the thirteenth century. Most of it was destroyed during the Second World War but later painstakingly reconstructed. Miodowa Street is located in the Old Town and links Feta Street with Krasiński Square. Miodowa literally means honey. In the sixteenth century the street was famous for its ginger bread shops – hence its name. The street has a rather tasty cultural history too.

Bernardo Bellotto was a Venetian urban landscape painter or vedutista, famous for his views of European cities such as Dresden, Vienna, or Turin. He was the pupil and nephew of Canaletto and sometimes used the latter’s name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto. Like many fellow artists, he was a well-travelled man. In 1764, he accepted an invitation from Poland’s newly elected king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, to become his court painter in Warsaw. Here he remained for the rest of his life, producing numerous delightful urban views. With meticulous detail he depicted the streets and architecture of the capital. In 1777, he painted a view Miodowa Street with the hustle and bustle of the traffic and the architectural splendour of its Rococo palaces, mansions and churches. One of the buildings (the roof at least) which the artist included on the painting is the late seventeenth century church of the Capuchins, founded by King Jan III Sobieski. The church was built by Tylman van Gameren, an architect and engineer who was born in Utrecht. At the age of twenty-eight he settled in Poland where he was employed by Maria Kazimiera, wife of King Jan III. Tylman was responsible for a number of buildings that are regarded as gems of Baroque architecture. In Poland, he is known as Tylman Gamerski.

How did such a talented Dutch artist end up in Poland? In a time that the notion of nationhood was not a matter of concern, Holland was effectively made up of cities. This city-culture created a society that did not nurture the leading role of an aristocracy as was the case elsewhere in Europe. Socio-economic life was dominated by well-to-do ‘burghers’ who lived and worked in the cities. Equality of opportunity in Dutch economic life gave society a competitive edge that was unrivalled. The Dutch ‘Golden Age’ was an era of extraordinary vitality, be it in economic, scientific or artistic terms. With the growing prosperity of the Republic, the demand for works of art increased. Intense competition made art cheap. It meant that painters needed to supplement their income in order to keep their families afloat. Jan Steen ran a public house, Jan van de Capelle was a textile merchant, Willem Kalf an antique dealer, Jacob van Ruysdael was a surgeon, and most cruelly of all: Meindert Hobbema stopped painting altogether after marriage. He found a more lucrative job in an Amsterdam tax office. The seventeenth century produced too many artists and not enough clients. The market was too small for such an overwhelming presence of talent. To young artists, the presence of so many painters proved inhibiting. For many there was but one solution: move – move elsewhere, anywhere. And move they did during the Golden Age. They moved in droves. They headed for England, Italy, Sweden, Germany, even for Russia. It is interesting to note that foreign ambassadors in the Netherlands functioned as ‘scouts’ who encouraged artists to move abroad with the promise of employment or commissions. William Temple for instance was known to persuade artists to cross the Channel and settle in England. The situation for a talented young architect was similar to that of other artists. Tylman was trained by Jacob van Campen whilst the latter was busy building the famous Amsterdam Stadhuis on the Dam. In 1650, Tylman left for Italy, the dream and ambition of any seventeenth century artist. While in Venice, he earned the reputation as a skilled painter of battle scenes. In 1660, he was working in Leiden. There he met Prince Jerzy Sebastian Lubomirski, and accepted the tempting invitation to come to Poland as his architect and military engineer (to design fortifications). From 1670 onwards, he won fame as a court architect of palaces, gardens, country houses, monasteries and churches in and around Warsaw. In 1685 he was formally acknowledged as a Polish nobleman. Van Gameren left behind more than seventy grand buildings and a collection of architectural some 1,000 drawings.

The most famous person to hang around Miodowa Street was young Chopin. Thanks to his extensive correspondence, much can be learned about the composer’s favourite places in Warsaw. One of them was the area on and around Miodowa Street where the entire social life of the Polish capital was concentrated. The street had a number of bookshops. One of the shops which sold books about musical composition was owned by Antoni Brzezina who, between 1822 and 1832, ran a firm that published mainly small piano compositions of Polish composers: Chopin, Elsner, Kurpiński, and Ogiński. After 1832 Sennewald took over the publishing house. Young Chopin was a regular customer at Brzezina’s shop. The surrounding area had numerous cafés where students and intellectuals debated for hours about art and politics. Apparently, Chopin could be found here almost every day. It was in this area that the composer’s early career took off. In January 1821 a new music society was established under the aegis of the Warsaw Merchant Club, located at that time at Miodowa Street. The merchants of the city were keen to promote art, culture and entertainment for the benefit of the educated classes in town and in support of various altruistic causes. The first confirmed Chopin performance at the club took place on 19 December 1829. Krasiński Square was the former home to the Polish National Theatre. It was the site where Chopin premiered his first piano concerto in March of 1830. Six months later he played his farewell concert there before leaving the country forever.

Rue Mosnier & Rue Montorgueil (Paris)

Manet and Monet – one festive occasion, two paintings, two streets, two faces of modernism.

To commemorate the recent Exposition Universelle, an exuberant celebration of luxury and prosperity, the French government declared 30 June 1878 a national holiday. Called the Fête de la Paix, this day also marked France’s recovery from the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870/1 and the divisive Paris Commune that followed. As well as demonstrating nationalist unity, the celebrations of 30 June were seen as an opportunity to strengthen the position of the Republican regime, still fragile after the major political confrontations of 1876/7. Two years later, July 14 was designated the French National Day.

From the second-floor window of his studio at no. 4 Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, Édouard Manet could see the Pont de l’Europe to the left. Straight ahead was the new Rue Mosnier (today, Rue de Berne), which he painted on various occasions. From there, he captured the holiday afternoon with his precise staccato brushwork in a patriotic harmony of the reds, whites, and blues waving from the windows. His 1878 oil painting ‘La Rue Mosnier aux drapeaux’ is a vivid evocation of Paris in the 1870s: the construction site on the left, where the street overlooks the railway cutting, records the enormous transformation of the city. The urban street, of course, was a principal subject of Impressionist painting. Manet was one of those artists who aimed to show not only the transformation the Industrial Age had brought about, but also how these changes affected society and individuals.

Claude Monet ‘La Rue Montorgueil’ depicts the same festival that had inspired Manet. Like its twin painting ‘Rue Saint-Denis’, it was painted on 30 June 1878. The Rue Montorgueil is a fashionable street in the Châtelet-Les Halles district lined with famous restaurants (including L’Escargot at no. 38, opened in 1875), cafés, bakeries (including La Maison Stohrer at no. 51, founded in 1730), fish stores, cheese, wine, and flower shops. Traditionally, it is one of the most vibrant streets in the heart of Paris. The painting produced by Monet supplies a more festive and upbeat image than Manet’s depiction of the ‘Rue Mosnier’. The painters approached their subject in a similar manner. Monet did not mix with the crowd either. Both images propose a distanced vision observed from above (Monet painted his view from a balcony, whilst Manet was seated as his window). Monet applied Impressionist techniques to the full. Its multitude of small strokes of colour, suggests the animation of the crowd and the wavering of flags in a sea of red, white and blue colours.

There is, however, a difference in depth. Monet is happy recording the festive nature of the impression, a colourful outdoor scene, sketched quickly and spontaneously in order to capture the enthusiasm of initial perception. The artist functions as reporter. The ‘Rue Montorgueil’ is a perfect example of Impressionist ‘forgetfulness’ in art. Radicalism is an aesthetic criterion, not a political one. Manet’s ‘Rue Mosnier’ on the other hand is a balanced reminder of past and present. Manet observed both elegant passengers in hansom cabs and, in the foreground, a worker carrying a ladder. The hunched amputee on crutches, who passes by fenced-in debris left from the construction of a new train track, is most likely a victim of the war. His presence is a painful memory of recent events. Manet’s sensitivity to the sacrifices made during those troubled years tempered his optimism in regard to national pride and new-found prosperity. His stance was a political one.

Monet versus Manet means ‘forgetful’ art versus ‘political’ art. The one approach emphasized that modernism merely meant a revolution in style and technique; the other is a reminder that the idea of avant-garde had its origins in the socio-political ideas of Saint-Simon (he was the first to use the military term as a cultural metaphor). Monet, like most Impressionists, may have veered away from the political side of the avant-garde, but Manet’s outlook as expressed in the ‘Rue Mosnier’ stands very much in that tradition.

Boulevard Haussmann (Paris)

The Boulevard Haussmann runs for more than two and a half kilometres from the eighth to the ninth arrondissement. It is one of the wide tree-lined Parisian boulevards created by Baron Haussmann during the renovation of Paris inspired by Napoleon III.

Gustave Caillebotte, a lawyer by training, was a wealthy young man. His father had made a fortune supplying Napoleon’s army with uniforms, bedding and other textiles. Gustave inherited part of that fortune at the age twenty-six. He took on painting as a hobby. His first submissions to the official Salon being rejected, he turned to the Impressionists, and in 1876 he was invited to submit work to their second Impressionist Exhibition. Not having to make a living from his work, the five hundred or so paintings he created stayed in the family. He was also a great patron of the arts. He purchased about sixty-four paintings from Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and others, which he left to the French State. His collection is now the crux of the Impressionist holdings at the Musée d’Orsay.

Caillebotte lived just down the Boulevard Haussmann, and painted the avenue in many different lights as the days and seasons changed. Most Impressionist paintings of Haussmann’s Paris depict a sunny city of socialites at leisure, dancing, shopping, boating or drinking. For Caillebotte, the modern metropolis was a darker and lonelier place. In his paintings, men leaning on new bridges seem engulfed by steel girders. Others stand on balconies, looking down at the Boulevard Haussmann – above yet dwarfed by the street (‘Un balcon: Boulevard Haussmann’, 1880). His perspectives and panoramic views seem to shade the images with loneliness and a sense of alienation. His best pictures pose a question. How does the modernization of a metropolis affect its inhabitants?

The Musée Jacquemart-André is located at no. 158 Boulevard Haussmann. Édouard André, descendant of a banking family, devoted his considerable fortune to buying works of art. He married Nélie Jacquemart, a well-known society painter. The couple amassed one of the finest collections of Italian art in France. When André died, his wife completed the decoration of the Italian Museum. Faithful to the plan agreed with her husband, she bequeathed the magnificent collections to the Institut de France.

The museum was opened to the public in 1913. The museum has also been largely responsible for the re-discovery of the work of the Caillebotte brothers. Whilst Gustave chose art from the outset, his brother Martial was a pianist and composer who later took to photography. They spent much time together, and the themes Gustave painted – street scenes, family life, bridges and trains, sailing and canoeing – Martial photographed. In 2011 an exhibition entitled ‘The Private World of the Caillebotte Brothers’ showed some thirty-five paintings and 150 family photos offering a window on their personal views of Paris in a time of change. Gustave’s large paintings were displayed in tandem with Martial’s small sepia-toned snapshots. Art and photography – no longer considered as rival arts, but exhibited in a juxtaposition of perfect harmony.

From 1906 to 1919, novelist Marcel Proust lived at no. 102 Boulevard Haussmann. There, he wrote the major part of À la recherche du temps perdu. Suffering from bronchial asthma and severe allergies since childhood, he created a space that sheltered him from dust, smells, noises and drafts. Sound and light were barred from his bedroom where velvet curtains created a semi-dark interior. All of the room’s apertures were shielded. The two sets of double doors were permanently shut or heavily curtained; a five-panelled Chinese screen stood behind the head of his bed; the single door leading to his dressing room was strictly regulated; the two windows shuttered. In order to create a barrier against noise from outside, Proust had lined the walls and ceiling with cork. Only by closing himself off could he live within the expanding domain of his novel. In the room the past was present everywhere. It was cluttered with unattractive furniture. His mother’s grand piano occupied a central place; his father’s velvet armchair was facing his bed; his mother’s worktable in front of two revolving bookcases blocked one of the double doors; there was, furthermore, a mirrored wardrobe; a rosewood chest with a marble top and mirror; a Chinese cabinet; a free standing clock; and an oak desk that was never used save for piling up papers and books. Proust’s writing place was his brass bed placed at the corner of the bedroom to enable the novelist to monitor the room. Warmed by woolly jumpers and hot water bottles, he wrote using his knees as a desk. Living in one of Paris’s most modern streets, Proust blocked all aspects of contemporary life from his apartment. Driven by technology the cityscape had changed dramatically, leaping forwards to a brave new future. In the midst of all modernity was a single soul who looked inwards and backwards in the nostalgic search for times lost.

It was this startling contradiction that must have inspired Alan Bennett. His short film 102 Boulevard Haussmann is set in 1916 and based upon an episode in Marcel Proust’s life. After 1907 Proust (played by Alan Bates) was an asthmatic invalid, writing and thinking in bed, and being looked after by his maid Céleste (played by Janet McTeer). Their cloistered relationship is the essence of the storyline. Proust’s demands deny Céleste’s husband, on short leave from the trenches, private time with his wife. He knowingly interrupts their love-making. She, in turn, intervenes to ‘protect’ Proust from his homosexual attraction towards a young viola player whom he lures to his apartment to perform César Franck’s beautiful phrase which recurs in À la recherche. She created the environment which enabled Proust to write. The ‘fictional reality’ of the film is very much Bennett territory. In a static world of repressed intimacy the incidental and seemingly insignificant become meaningful. It was the author’s intent to communicate the nature of artistic genius and the creative process at work.

Raglan Road (Dublin)

Raglan Road runs between Pembroke Road and Clyde Road in exclusive Ballsbridge, Dublin. It came into existence in 1857, on the conclusion of peace after the Crimean War, and was named after one-armed (he had lost his right arm at Waterloo) Field Marshal FitzRoy James Henry Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, the first Chief Commander in that war. Lord Raglan and his staff were at the time blamed by press and government for the sufferings of the British soldiers in the terrible Crimean winter before the Siege of Sevastopol, owing to shortages of food and clothing. Historians have since suggested that the chief neglect rested with the home authorities, and the appalling logistical support from England. The severe situation at the front line sent Florence Nightingale into action.

On 3 October 1946 a poem appeared in The Irish Times under the title ‘Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away’. The author was Patrick Kavanagh. The poet whilst walking on a ‘quiet street’ recalls a doomed love affair with a younger woman:

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

The poem became famous under its later title ‘On Raglan Road’. The young lady involved was Hilda Moriarty who later married Donogh O’Malley, the Irish Minister for Health. In a 1987 interview she explained that the main reason for the failure of their relationship was the wide age gap between them. The poet was forty, she eighteen years younger. The poem itself had been set as a challenge to him. Kavanagh had described himself to Hilda as a ‘peasant poet’. She did not consider vegetables fit for poetry and asked him to write something more fundamental. He left and created ‘On Ragland Road’.

The Bailey, Duke Street, is a famous Victorian pub which has a special place in the history of Dublin life – literary, social, and political. It was there that Kavanagh met Luke Kelly of The Dubliners. As a result of that meeting, Kelly set ‘On Grafton Street’ to the music of a Gaelic song ‘Fáinne Geal an Lae’. The song had been published by Edward Walsh in 1847 in his collection of Irish Popular Songs. In 1873, it was translated into English as ‘The Dawning of the Day’ by native Irish-speaker Patrick Weston Joyce, the outstanding historian, author, and music collector, whose most enduring work is The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (first edition published in 1869). Luke Kelly however denied that chain of events. In Luke Kelly: A Memoir his biographer Des Geraghy describes a gathering of poets and singers in The Bailey. Kavanagh asked Kelly on that occasion to sing ‘Ragland Road’ for him. This would suggest that the former had already set his poem to music. In an interview for Irish television, author Benedict Kiely described how Kavanagh had asked him previously if his poem ‘Dark Haired Miriam Ran Away’ could be set to the tune of ‘Dawning of the Day’. Whatever the genesis of the song may be, ever since The Dubliners put it on their repertoire, ‘Ragland Road’ has become a Dublin anthem, performed and recorded by a string of artists. Van Morrison’s rendering of the song is undoubtedly the most brilliant one.

Baggot Street (Dublin)

Irish writers are wedded to place. Their imaginations seem spurred by the lure of specific territories. James Joyce had set a precedent by – even in literary exile – describing Dublin’s localities and places with an almost obsessive precision.

Baggot Street is named after Baggotrath, the manor granted to Sir Robert Bagod, the first Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas, in the thirteenth century. It runs from Merrion Row to the northwestern end of Pembroke Road. The street is divided into two sections, Lower and Upper Baggot Street and crosses the Grand Canal. Baggot Street is famous for its many pubs and home to the ‘Baggot Street Mile’, otherwise known as the ‘Twelve Pubs of Xmas Crawl’. From an artistic point of view, the street is of double interest. In 1909, painter Francis Bacon was born at no. 63 Lower Baggot Street.

Thomas Kinsella, a prolific Irish (Dublin) poet, translator, and editor, has put the street on the literary map. Much of Kinsella’s poetry has the urban inspiration of the district where he grew up between Bow Lane and Basin Lane, an area both of personal and historical associations such as Irish nationalist Robert Emmet, the last person to be hanged, drawn and quartered in the aftermath of the 1803 uprising, or Jonathan Swift whose St Patrick’s Hospital is nearby. Many members of young Thomas’s family were employed at the Guinness brewery. Kinsella’s Dublin is depicted in Thomas Kinsella: A Dublin Documentary, published by the O’Brien Press in 2006, which presents twenty poems alongside comments, family photographs, prints and other material. The book places the poet solidly in his Dublin context. At the same time, however, and at its best, Kinsella’s poetry transcends place and locality. His famous poem ‘Baggot Street Deserta’ (1956) suggests little involvement with the city, there is no direct reference to specific locality, no topographical identification. Its strength lies in the poet’s complex and multi-faceted relationship with different and contrasting impacts of experience in the city where he grew up as a child. The splendid closing lines give the only reference to the reality of place:

My quarter-inch of cigarette
Goes flaring down to Baggot Street.

Place, in much of Kinsella’s poetry, is mindscape rather than landscape.

Basin Street (New Orleans)

Basin Street (Rue Bassin) is a street in New Orleans, Louisiana, close to the French Quarter. The name comes from the turning basin of the Carondelet Canal (also known as the Old Basin Canal) which was constructed in 1794 on the order of Governor Francisco Luis Hector de Carondelet and which remained in use until 1938. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century railroad tracks ran parallel to the Canal and then turned on to Basin Street to one of the city’s main railroad depots on Canal Street. The massive turning basin at the head of the Canal was the inspiration for the naming of Basin Street. The industrialization of the area in the late nineteenth century turned what had been a fine residential street into a red light district. From 1897 through World War I, the back side of Basin Street was the front of the Storyville red light district.

The name of the area was coined in reference to city alderman Sidney Story, who wrote the legislation creating the district. The ambition was to limit prostitution to one part of town where authorities could monitor and regulate the practice. In the late 1890s, the New Orleans city government studied the legalized red light districts in German and Dutch ports and set up Storyville based on such models. Between 1895 and 1915, so-called ‘blue books’ were published which were guides to prostitution for visitors to the district’s services including house descriptions, prices, particular services and the ‘stock’ each house had to offer. The blue-books were inscribed with the motto: Order of the Garter: Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense. Establishments in Storyville ranged from cheap ‘cribs’ to a row of elegant mansions along Basin Street for well-heeled customers. Black and white brothels coexisted, but black men were barred from legally purchasing services rendered in either black or white brothels. Nonetheless, brothels with black prostitutes serving blacks openly flourished with the full knowledge of the police and other local authorities a short distance uptown from Storyville proper. With a main railway station nearby, business boomed in the district. And so did music. It was tradition in the better establishments to hire a piano player and sometimes small bands.

Jazz did not originate in Storyville, but it flourished there as it did in the rest of the city. Many out-of-town visitors first heard this style of music there before the music spread north. Some people from elsewhere continue to associate Storyville with the origins of jazz. One of the finest pianists in the district was Ferdinand Joseph La Mothe, better known as Jelly Roll Morton. At the age of fourteen, he began working as a piano player in a brothel (or as it was referred to then, a sporting house). He was a pivotal figure in the development of early jazz. His composition ‘Jelly Roll Blues’ was the first published jazz composition, appearing in 1915.

Storyville was closed down in 1917 after campaigns by moral crusaders and an intolerant attitude by the army. Soldiers were forbidden to enter the area and similar places. Soon after 1917 separate black and white underground dens of prostitution emerged around the city. The district continued in a more subdued state as an entertainment centre through the 1920s, with various dance halls, gambling dens, cabarets and restaurants. Brothels were also regularly found in the area despite repeated police raids. Almost all the buildings in the former district were demolished in the 1930s. While much of the area contained tired and decayed buildings, the old mansions along Basin Street, some of the finest structures in the city, were also leveled. The city government wished to blot the notorious district from memory. The history of Storyville has been recorded in the haunting photographs of John Ernest Joseph Bellocq. Born in a wealthy white Creole family in the French Quarter of New Orleans, he made a living by taking photographic records for local companies. More interestingly, he took personal photographs of the hidden side of local life, of the opium dens in Chinatown, and of the whores of Storyville. Some of the women are nude, some dressed, and others posed as if acting some exotic narrative. Many of the negatives that have survived were damaged, in part deliberately. Whether this was done by Bellocq himself, or by his Jesuit priest brother who – ironically – inherited the photographs, or by someone else, has never been established. The mystique about the photographer inspired Louis Malle’s controversial 1978 film Pretty Baby. Bellocq’s images have inspired stories and poems about the women in them, including Brooke Bergan’s Storyville: A Hidden Mirror.

‘Basin Street Blues’ is a song written by Spencer Williams, a jazz musician and singer from New Orleans. The song, published in 1926, was performed by many Dixieland jazz bands. Hundreds of recordings have been made since its creation, including a version by Miles Davis in 1963. The following famous lines were later added by Glenn Miller and Jack Teagarden:

Won’tcha come along with me,
To the Mississippi?
We’ll take a boat to the lan’ of dreams,
Steam down the river down to New Orleans:
The band’s there to meet us,
Old friends to greet us.
Where all the people like to meet,
This is Basin Street.

Chorus:
Basin Street, is the street,
Where the Elite, always meet,
In New Orleans. Lan’ of dreams,
You’ll never know how nice it seems
Or just how much it really means,
Glad to be; yes, siree,
Where welcome’s free, dear to me,
Where I can lose, my Basin Street blues.

Sackville Street (Dublin)

O’Connell Street is Dublin’s main thoroughfare. Up till 1924 it was known as Sackville Street, after which the street was renamed in honour of nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell whose statue stands at the lower end of the street, facing the river and O’Connell Bridge.

In 1935 Gogarty published his first prose work, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street  (subtitled ‘A Phantasy in Fact’), a semi-fictional memoir that tells, in reverse chronological order, the story of Gogarty’s Dublin through a series of interconnected anecdotes and characters sketches. Oliver Joseph St John Gogarty was an Irish poet, a nationalist politician (one of the founding members of Sinn Féin in 1905), and a surgeon who served as the inspiration for the character of Buck Mulligan in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Young Gogarty was a talented cyclist. In 1901, however, he was banned from the tracks for using bad language. Cycling used to be a sport for gentlemen. At Trinity, he developed his interested in literature and poetry, making the acquaintance of W.B. Yeats and George Moore, and forming a friendship with the up-and-coming James Joyce. In the summer of 1904, Gogarty made arrangements to rent the famous Martello Tower in Sandycove with the ambitious plan of housing ‘the Bard’ (i.e. the pennyless James Joyce).

Joyce stayed there briefly before leaving abruptly. Joyce was never convinced about the sincerity of Gogarty’s motives. Gogarty made use of the Martello Tower during the following year as a writing retreat and party venue.  Between 1916 and 1918 Gogarty published three small volumes of poetry and an equal number of plays all performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Most of his output dates from the 1920s and 1930s. In 1924 he published An Offering of Swans followed in1929 by another book of verse, Wild Apples. This was followed in 1933 by Selected Poems.

Gogarty’s name appeared in print as the renegade priest Fr. Oliver Gogarty in George Moore’s 1905 novel The Lake. Dublin remembers this son of the city in another (typical) manner. Designed in late nineteenth century style the Oliver St John Gogarty Bar is located in the heart of Temple Bar.