One of France's greatest art galleries, the Musee D'Orsay, is closed for renovations and guess where many of the paintings ended up. The answer is the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra where over 100 masterpieces of European art now hang. The artists include Monet, Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Rousseau, Bonnard and Vuillard, and their works cover the period 1886 to the early 1900s. The exhibition is called: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and beyond: post-impressionism from the Musee D'Orsay.
Today we were privileged to see this exhibition and remind ourselves of the glories we had seen 8 years ago when three of those present, myself included, were on holiday in Paris. It is truly spectacular and our entry tickets were provided by Emily as a Christmas present. The people of Canberra are really lucky to have this event come to them and they have responded in droves. Some 30 of the paintings had audio commentary explaining the background to the works and the intricacies of their composition.
After the tour of the gallery, our lunch was a touch risky. Canberra has an institution called the BrodBurger, named after the owner of a caravan parked with dubious legality alongside Lake Burley Griffin. Forgetting that for a moment, the various kinds of burgers are highly sought after and the queues were lengthy to order them. So we each consumed a BrodBurger while sitting on the grass under shady trees in the lakeside park. The true estimate of their value was given by the large flock of birds including sea gulls and magpies lined alongside awaiting the crumbs from our 'table'!
AS
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