Through the gateway

Wednesday
It was an early start this morning, as two of Laura's Peace Corps friends, who are traveling around Europe, were flying in from Barcelona on RyanAir, landing at Beauvais at about 8.30. Beauvais is quite a distance north of Paris, and we live south of Paris, so we had to allow two and a half hours to get there. They'd had to get up around 3am, so they were happy to have a fairly low-key day. We went first to the artist's village of Barbizon, and had a walk around looking at the mosaics of paintings from the "Barbizon School", and went for a short walk in the Forest as far as Elephant Rock, then we had lunch at the crêperie, then I dropped them off in Fontainebleau for the afternoon, so they could look round the chateau. My blip is taken through the gateway of the house which had been the home of the painter, Diaz de la Peña. Pena was born in 1807 in Bordeaux to Spanish parents who had fled the Peninsular Wars. He was dogged by misfortune in his younger years, becoming an orphan at an early age, then when he was thirteen, contracted an infection due to an insect sting or snake bite, necessitating the amputation of his left leg. In 1823 he became an apprentice in painting on porcelain at a china factory in Paris, but he soon tired of industrial work and embarked on a course of independent study. From about 1833 he began to explore the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he became a regular summer visitor over the next few years, forming a close association with Theodore Rousseau and the other landscape painters of what came to be known as the School of Barbizon. He died in 1876 at the Mediterranean town of Menton.