This Mirror Page connects several fables



Louveciennes and Le Vésinet

Louveciennes, on the south side of the Seine, and Le Vésinet, on the north side are now absorbed into the western suburbs of Paris. Once the railway line from Paris to St. Germain-en-Laye opened in the mid-19th century, painters, musicians, writers and dancers soon followed it out there. Alfred Sisley, the impressionist, captures the era with these two paintings of Louveciennes. It was only slightly earlier that Bizet had moved to Le Vésinet to become a neighbor of La Mogador and in the early 1930s Josephine Baker and Anaïs Nin would live in Louveciennes.

Chemin de la Machine Louveciennes, painted in 1873.

Early Snow at Louveciennes, painted in 1871-1872.

A century earlier, that is to say in the early 1770's, Madame du Barry - the last mistress of Louis XV - lived in the adjacent Château de Louveciennes, commissioning the exquisite Pavillon de Mme du Barry à Louveciennes shown below. She hired Fragonard to paint four giant wall canvasses for it, depicting the Progress of Love, but she rejected them because she thought them old-fashioned, and she allowed him to keep them. I agree with her but she went to the guillotine in 1793; he would go onto add 10 more to the series. The paintings are now in the Frick Collection in New York.

Copyright: David Pendery