Clark collection at Giverny

If you are in Normandy between now and October, please don't miss this show at the Impresionist Museum in Giverny.  72 glorious French master paintings have been graciously loaned to the museum  by the Clark Collection in Massachusetts.

Sterling and Francine Clark lived in Paris,  where he was a young,  and already wealthy,  lawyer and she was his young and beautiful French wife.  They started buying paintings around 1912, purchasing works they loved and which to them embodied all that was new and fresh in the modern impressionist movement.

What a life!!  They could have been characters plucked from an Edith Wharton novel, glamorous, interesting, part of the elite New York society, who felt at ease anywhere in the world.  How I would have loved to have lived at that time ....

Our Friend Alberto

We have had a lot of fun things happen in our garden,  children's tea parties, grown-up's dinner parties, treasure hunts, Easter egg hunts, pony races, three legged races, three-legged pony races (no I'm kidding) charity lunches, Christmas fairs .....   but of them all, I hold a very special place in my heart for the days when our friend Alberto came to paint.

When Alberto came to paint I would pull weeds, fix garden furniture, brush the dog .... anything that meant I could spend as much time as possible in the garden watching his pictures grow, and listening to him chat about everything and nothing in particular in his delicious rolling Brazilian accent.

Watching any artist paint is  hypnotic, and Alberto's colourful, busy, Brazilian style is particularly fascinating.

He'd turn up on his bike with easel, huge canvases, and a lot more stacked into an old cart  attached to the back of the bike.  When he left at the end of the day, we'd creep into the barn and look again at the canvases he'd left to dry.

He painted all along the valley, often besides the river, and today there are pictures of the vallée de l'Eure, by Alberto, hung in houses all over the world.

For the moment he's back in Brazil, where he's done some fantastic urban scenes, and has also returned to one of his favourite themes - pianos.   Recently he created a huge mosaic for an underground station.

We are looking forward to him coming back to stay one day,  there's an easel waiting here for him.

If you'd like to see more of his work, visit his website here.