Word: gaspard
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Napoleon's young aide-de-camp, General Gaspard Gourgaud, left a journal describing the Emperor's last years on St. Helena, a speck of British territory in the South Atlantic. Gourgaud's entries, unintentionally hilarious, record the great man's stupendous banality after he lost the thing that made him interesting -- his power. "October 21 (1815). I walk with the Emperor in the garden, and we discuss women. He maintains that a young man should not run after them . . . November 5. The Grand Marshal (Montholon) is angry because the Emperor told him he was nothing but a ninny . . . January...
...wonder that, in a painter with so pronounced a taste for the specific, there was a constant argument between stereotypes and things seen. Constable loved his masters: Claude Lorrain, Ruisdael, Gaspard Poussin. Some of his most delectable paintings, such as The Cornfield, 1826, rely on the Claudean use of dark repoussoir trees framing a view of bright space at the center, and this can make them too charming to a modern eye. Constable himself remarked that The Cornfield "has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give." But the great fact of nature, as Benjamin West...
...struggle up the snowy folds of Mont Blanc looking like a necklace of chocolate chips dropped into a vanilla sundae. Meanwhile, journalistic history is displayed in a set of pictures and captions from the first interview ever recorded (in 1886) for both eye and ear. The cameramen-interviewers are Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who worked under the single professional name Nadar, and his son Paul. Their subject is Michel-Eugène Chevreul, an elderly scientist and expert on the theory of color mixing. Visible in some frames: a tubular machine that recorded Chevreul's words...
Sylvia returns fully assembled in Gaspard de la Nuit as the mother of a lonely teen-age boy who wanders the streets of Barcelona whistling a complex piece by Ravel. Music is to young Mauricio what fashion is to Sylvia and what the perfect apartment is to Roberto and Marta: a way of erasing the outside world. It is also a way of severing Mauricio from his dull, affluent life. The tale ends with a prince-and-the-pauper twist, when he changes places with an urchin who is his double...
...short, an intensely specific artist. Specificity did not come easily, for any landscapist practicing around 1800 faced a battery of required stereotypes-chiefly the pastoral landscape with framing trees and unified brown tone, in the manner of Claude or Gaspard Poussin. Time and again, we see Constable glancing at the formula, using it, sheering off. He writes in 1803, the year of his Royal Academy debut: "I have been running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand . . I shall shortly return to Bergholt where I shall make some laborious studies from nature - and I shall endeavour...