In one scene in Paris Red, Victorine thinks of all the flowers she can to pass the time as she poses for Manet. As she makes a list of posies in her mind, she also thinks about how the next day will be Sunday, the day when the bird sellers also come to the flower […]
My copy of Cara Black’s new mystery, Murder on the Champ de Mars, arrived Tuesday, and I’m thrilled. I love to tag along as Aimée Leduc navigates Paris by Vespa, investigating crimes and injustice, and I’m as much in awe of her fashion sense as her street sense. Fourteen books into this series, I feel […]
I couldn’t find boots that were exactly like the ones I picture Victorine wearing in Paris Red, so I bought these teal suede ones. In the novel, Victorine gets her green boots from one of the prostitutes her mother sews for. She’s still a girl when she receives the gift, but she keeps the boots […]
I celebrated Victorine Meurent’s birthday this past Wednesday, February 18. She was born 171 years ago, in 1844. (She died in 1927, at 83.) I know a few other people celebrated along with me because I got some favorites and retweets on Twitter, as well as some likes on Facebook. I thought it would be […]
This is another of my shabby photos from 1983, taken at the corner of rue de Seine and rue Jacques Callot. It shows the restaurant La Palette and a bit of the outside of Galerie Lara Vincy when the artist Ben (Ben Vautier) covered the outside of the gallery with colored writing for his Boîtes et […]
Kirkus just reviewed Paris Red and said some wonderful things: “Manet’s muse ponders color, power, sex and love in vibrant 1860s Paris…Gibbon writes in a rather fragmented style, with short chapters…the overall effect is lyrical and fits the shabbily gorgeous Parisian setting. Fans of art history, Paris and contemporary Künstleroman like Girl With a Pearl Earring […]
When I found out this weekend that Publishers Weekly gave Paris Red a “starred” review, the news came from the source. PW Reviews tweeted it directly to me @Maureen_Gibbon: I thought I’d just be catching up on tweets about cats, writing and Paris, so the tweet shocked me. I got so flustered I had to do something […]
This is where I lived in Brooklyn in 1987. I took the photo from the roof of 338 9th Street, looking downhill toward 5th Avenue. I used to lie on the roof of 338 on an old, flowered bedspread and stare up at the pink Brooklyn night sky. Sometimes I lay listening to the sound […]
Where does a gaze in a painting come from? In this post, I’d like to share what Julyan Davis told me about working with the model for By Her Lily White Hand (On the Banks of the Ohio), 2012. When I emailed Mr. Davis, I asked, “When you asked the model to pose for the work, did […]
This is a Julyan Davis painting called By Her Lily White Hand (On the Banks of the Ohio), 2012. It’s one of Davis’s murder ballad paintings, a series of “narrative paintings, setting traditional Appalachian music against the contemporary South.” In the song “On the Banks of the Ohio,” a man asks his love to take a […]
Paris Red: A Novel by Maureen Gibbon 