Week 19

A Girl with a Kitten, 1745

Attributed to Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Paris c.1715 - Amsterdam 1783

French painter who specialized in portraits executed in pastels.

Perronneau began his career as an engraver, apparently studying with Laurent Cars,

whose portrait he drew, and working for the 

entrepreneurial printseller Gabriel Huquier, rue Saint-Jaques, Paris,

making his first portraits in oils, and especially in pastels, in the 1740s.

His career was much in the shadow of the master 

of the French pastel portrait, Maurice Quentin de La Tour.

In the Salon of 1750, Perronneau exhibited his pastel portrait 

of Maurice Quentin de La Tour, but found to his dismay 

that La Tour was exhibiting his own self portrait, perhaps a malicious confrontation

to demonstrate his superiority in the technique.

He made his Salon debut with a pastel portrait in 1746 and received

full membership in the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1753,

with portraits of fellow artist Jean-Baptiste Oudry and

 the sculptor Lambert-Sigisbert Adam, both now at the Louvre Museum.

After 1779 he no longer exhibited in the Paris Salon, 

but the clientele in his portraits reveal how widely he travelled in the provinces of France,

with a group of sitters connected with Orléans, but also in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon.

Farther afield he may have been in Turin and Rome,

and in Spain, Hamburg, Poland, Russia and England.

Image from the Diary 2011-Week 19, National Gallery London

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Flowering corners and arch-ways  'for week 19'

after a beautiful sunset on Mother's Day

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 a 'few' white Peonies...

 already flowering

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another 'red-color-spot'

 Rhododendron, complementing the white Deutzia sabra 'Candissima'

 and evergreen Fatsia Japonica

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 "Weissdorn" - Fire thorn

The perfect nesting-house for a pair of Black Birds...and others.... 

....piepsing...chirping...singing...

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 Gladiolus byzantinus amongst Sage 'Jerusalem'

Philadelphus "Syringa" (Mock orange) with a heavy jasmine-like  sent

next to 

  the "Perueckenbaum" - Cotinus coggygria (Smoke tree)

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The  Poppy orientale

not very happy anymore, being next to a Rosemary which has taken over!

 the beautiful blossoms reach the size of  7" diameter when fully open!

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'en passant'.....

 

One of our Hoopoe's...

Eurasian Hoopoe

'strutting and picking around'....

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And at the end of the garden

a branch of Bamboo created a wonderful green arch-way by leaning into a tree

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'going wild'

 wild Marguerites in our Alfalfa and English rye grass field

a heaven for all kind of butterflies, bees, humble birds and.....

wild Orchid's appeared all over the place...

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Flowering greetings for this week to everybody!