During my scouting visit to Demopolis, I purchased a large new history of the Vine and Olive Colony by French historian, Eric Saugera. My knowledge of Madame Raoul, the Marchioness de Sinibaldi, had been gleaned from a few lines in Winston Smith’s history, “Days of Exile’. Now I learned more. To begin with, she had arrived in the canebrakes not as General Raoul’s wife, but as his mistress. Teresa Alvora Giannini was born in 1783, in Genoa, Italy. The twoRead more
Month: September 2017
The Marchioness returns to Demopolis (Part One)
In Ross King’s ‘The Judgement of Paris’, there’s an entertaining comparison between the working methods of Manet and Meissonier. In his rush to wow the Salon of 1868, Manet repeatedly bungled his ambitious canvas of the execution of Mexico’s Emperor Maximilan. The event was fresh and shocking, but Manet was not one for research. He was competing with the likes of Goya and Gericault- timing was everything, details be damned. As a result, as technicalities about uniforms and an absenceRead more