Last night I fell asleep reading historian and flâneur Richard Cobb’s Paris and Elsewhere. I woke up the morning with the book still in the sheets. I found out about Richard Cobb in 1988 or so when I checked The Streets of Paris out of the University of Iowa library. The book is a collaboration […]
Paris Red will be published by W. W. Norton in the U.S. in April 2015. Right now that seems like a long wait, but I know it isn’t, not in the world of publishing. In one very important way, it is also an ideal time for the book to come out because Spring 2015 marks […]
I haven’t blogged for several weeks because I’ve been busy working on the final editorial changes to Paris Red. In a couple of instances, I had to examine the key relationships in the book and bring a little more clarity to them, and to do that, I had to go deeply back into the novel. I […]
Researching Paris Red, I read widely about subjects directly and tangentially related to Victorine Meurent and Édouard Manet. Susan Chitty’s book about English artist Gwen John was both helpful and beautifully written. And let me declare here that almost everything I know about Gwen John I learned from Chitty’s Gwen John: 1876-1939. Before I read this […]
I don’t know if I would have been able to write the story of Victorine Meurent without the work of another artist—and I don’t just mean Manet, the man who painted her over and over. I mean that without the photos of Charles Marville, or Charles François Bossu, I would have had much more difficulty imagining […]
Manet inspires me for many reasons, but I’ll focus on just one in this love letter. Almost as soon as Manet started to paint, people criticized his choice of subjects, use of color, composition, or style of painting. One of his first critics was his teacher, Thomas Couture, who objected to Manet’s desire to portray […]
Do you see the resemblance that I see? Or am I just in love? How about this: Each age has its own muse—or maybe she keeps coming back. What do you think? All I know for certain is that I love these two women, and am moved by their images and their lives.
A snapshot from my old room in Paris, on Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui. Every morning when I got up, I looked out from the terrace to see the Suze sign. I just loved seeing it. That’s what gave me the idea for the details of this scene from Paris Red, where Victorine looks out the window of her new room: “There’s […]
It’s just a label from a box of candles, I know. But for me it turned into an artifact of Victorine Meurent’s life. I imagined it in her room, at her bedside. It was another detail that brought me into her days and nights. Victorine was Manet’s favorite, his “modèle de predilection.” And she was brilliant […]
Paris Red: A Novel by Maureen Gibbon 