I woke up to this fabulous Tweet from Einaudi Editore, the Italian publisher of Paris Red, or Rosso Parigi. Manet first traveled to Italy when he was 21, and I think the country was never far from his mind. In this New York Times article, writer Roderick Conway Morris says that Manet was “consistently” inspired by […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Sometimes I wonder how a person like me came to write a novel about Victorine Meurent and Édouard Manet. I live in a meadow and see more wildlife than I do museums. I wear jeans every day, and belts with big, rhinestone buckles. (See above.) Though I lived in NYC from 1980 – 1987 and […]
I’ve written before about the importance of green boots in my novel Paris Red. Victorine Meurent wears green leather boots, and they are part of her identity. Today I want to talk about Manet’s fascination with yellow gloves, and how that fascination came to play a role in my novel. Even though the figures in […]
Today I’m thinking of the black necklaces Manet often painted women wearing. Maybe many women did wear chokers. But I think Manet painted black ribbon necklaces in so many of his portraits because the strip of black against skin added something essential to his compositions—and just because he liked the way it looked. He made black chokers […]
Paris Red: A Novel by Maureen Gibbon 