By Moonlight In Neldoreth Forest - Ted Nasmith

A View of Naples through a Window, 1824. Franz Ludwig Catel

Abbotsford House

Yesterday I visited the Penates - the house of Russian painter Ilya Repin. It stands surrounded by pine forest, and the Bay of Finland is a 5 minute walk from the house.

The wooden house is very Russian style with little roofs and multiple terraces and enamel fireplaces in every room. There's a large studio on the second floor with large windows and skylights to allow as much natural light in as possible.

Repin was a very prolific painter and a huge name in his day, but also a bit of an eccentric. He always slept in a small unheated terrace, even through the winter. Him and his wife were vegetarian and practiced no-help dinner parties (with no servants at the door or the table). His weekly dinner parties on Wednesdays were attended by a multitude of artists, musicians, scientists. He was friends with Gorky, Mayakovsky, Chukovsky, Tolstoy, Yesenin etc. etc.

(Last picture: Ilya Repin paints opera singer Fyodor Shalyapin in his studio, 1914.)

Coughton Court from the East

Artist: Allen Edward Everitt (English, 1824-1882)

Date: n. d.

Medium: Watercolour

Collection: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom

Church of Chavenay

Yveline region of France

Pierre Poschadel

@utopie-sempiternelle

This is the view from Charlotte Brontë’s bedroom (now the Brontë Parsonage Museum), Haworth, Yorkshire. Charlotte was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters whose novels became classics of English literature. 

Period drama + Reading

NORTHANGER ABBEY (2007)

COLETTE(2018)

BRIGHT STAR (2009)

MR. MALCOLM'S LIST(2022)

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES (1985)

EMMA. (2020)

BECOMING JANE (2007)

The Stained Glass of Sainte-Chapelle

Interior of the upper chapel (looking northeast), Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, France, 1243–1248

This chapel is a masterpiece of the so-called Rayonnant (radiant) style of the High Gothic age, which dominated the second half of the century. It was the preferred style of the royal Parisian court of Saint Louis. Sainte-Chapelle’s architect carried the dissolution of walls and the reduction of the bulk of the supports to the point that some 6,450 square feet of stained glass make up more than than three-quarters of the structure. The emphasis is on the extreme slenderness of the architectural forms and on linearity in general. Although the chapel required restoration in the 19th century (after suffering damage during the French Revolution), it retains most of its original 13th-century stained glass. Approximately 49 feet high and 15 feet wide, they were the largest designed up to their time. (source)