Touring Tours 1

Tours is an ancient Gallo-Roman city that had once been the capital of the kingdom of France.  It is also the original home of the French language and the “art de vivre” (a land of harmony and proportion), graced by two major rivers.  It is also century located around 16 different castles!

I went to Tours on a day trip and while I wasn’t able to see any castles this time, I did see some other amazing things.  First stop was the train station.  Second stop McDonalds for some breakfast. 
My sister and I always stop by McDonalds for McGriddles when we go on long car trips and have to leave before the sun comes up.  I’m starting to miss the people and comforts of home.  So I popped into McDonald for a McGriddle. 

I must have forgotten that I was in a whole another world.  This is the breakfast menu in Tours, France; pancakes, fruit, coffee and juice.  It wasn’t my nostalgic McGriddle but it tasted just as good.  If you starve someone long enough they will eat anything!

The next thing I did was to look for the Tourist information center.  There I got a map and headed off to tour the town of Tours.  The first place I ended up was the Musee des Beaux-Arts.

Statues

  

Marcel Loyau

Onzain, 1895 – Boulogne-Billancourt, 1936

Centaur, 1927

Bronze

Legacy of the descendants of the artist, 1994.





Paintings

Clair Maugeais (Angers, 1964)
Drawing using a red thread on a double frame white plastic stretched over a wooden frame.

Plastic, wood and string. 100.5 x 199.5 x 4 cm.
(Oeuvre National Arts Centre plastic mat - Ministry of Culture and Communication, Paris. Inv. FNAC: 99-282)
Depot in June 2010.
The urban landscape that weaves Claire Maugeais USING um of red cotton thread on a double frame is made of white plastic body tris buildings seen in perspective. In the bottom of the composition appears between two buildings, a narrow space that opens on the horizon: a breakaway. The gaze is immediately directed towards the opening, guided by lines of flight and the shortcut pronounce the left building, the roof don'tl'angle breaks with large rectangular frame. This double frame suggests the thread of the composition and flow, disrupting the readability of the landscape: the gesture of the artist is min value in the path of yarn, in many places connected by nodes.

Thanks to this innovative technique, Claire Maugeais working on the relationship of gesture to the ground, a relationship very different from that involved in the design, since the movement of hands does not exactly follow the final pattern (nodes, rewind, ect.) Drawing in three dimensions making use of tools of the architect (the frame and plumb), the composition of Claire Maugeais resounds like an echo to contemporary classic work on perspective and the traditional genre of city view richly represented in mess Fine Arts Tours paintings by Pierre-Antoine Demachy and Charles-Antoine Rougeot.

Jean-Charles CAZIN
Samer, 1841 – Le Lavandou, 1901
Hagar and Ishmael in the desert, 1880
Deposit of the state, 1935

Monet
Claude Monet
Paris, 1840 - Giverny, 1926
An arm of the Seine near Vetheuil, 1878?
Legs Ms. Camille Lefevre, 1975

Donato Creti
Cremona, 1671 - Bologna, 1749
Young boy holding a page of writing
Legs Countess de Trobriand, 1895

Sebastien Clerc II

Paris, 1676 - Paris 1763

The deification of Aeneas

Piece of reception at the Royal Academy of Painting, 1704

Sebastien Le Clerc, who at the Academy as a professor of drawing and perspective, did this  piece by borrowing the characters from the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Testimony of the infinite love of Venus for her son, this very beautiful mythological theme was rarely represented in the eighteenth century. The river god poured waters on to the body of Numicus, the son of Venus, to wash away death.  The hero will pass through the passage that leads from the human world to that of the gods.

Depot's national museum of the Chateau de Versailles, 1951

Hyacinthe Collin de Vermont

Versailles 1693 - Paris 1761

Bacchus entrusted by Mercury to the Nymphs of the island of Naxos
Piece of reception at the Academic Royale of Painting and Sculpture, 1725
Since he was not loved by Zeus and Semele, Bacchus after his birth was confided by Hermes to the nymphs of the Isle of Naxos.  (Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 313)
Sending the Central Museum, 1803.

Objects

Pottery

Roman artifacts

Tempera paintings

 

The Cedar of Lebanon

Cedar of Lebanon

Cerus Libani A Rich

Height: 31 m

Wingspan 33m

Circumference of the trunk 1 m above ground: 7.5 m plant in 1804, this remarkable tree stretches its branches over an area of nearly 800 m2

Fritz

Died in Tours in 1904
Offered at Museum of the City

per mm Barnum and Bailey

Fritz came to Tours in the summer of 1902 as part of a long European tour of the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Born free and wild, Fritz, under the supervision of one Mr George Conklin, was the largest elephant in the Circus.

The European tour began in 1897 and visited many countries including Germany and Austria. It came to an end, five years later, in 1902, the year Fritz was killed.

Perhaps, when he arrived in Tours old Fritz thought to himself, “I’ve just about had enough of this!”.  Because after his final performance on his last evening in the Tours they chained him to four other elephants and set off across Tours to the station to head to the next show.

En route someone burnt Fritz with a cigar.  This made him break for freedom. He easily snapped his man-made chains, ran amok, uprooted trees and crashed his way around the city.  When they caught Fritz they decided he was ‘aggressive’ and his punishment was death.  They could have killed him by shooting him but instead they strangled him to death!  Circuses got more money from selling animal carcasses that didn’t have holes in it.

Poor Fritz.

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