Closed

This pub has been closed for quite a long time. I suspect that there will be many more such closures, long after the current crisis is over.

This morning I read about a forthcoming film "Echo in the Canyon" about the music that was played and recorded by the residents of California's Laurel Canyon in the 1960s. Jakob Dylan, son of Bob, has recorded an album of cover versions of songs, each performed with a different guest artist. My favourite was She played with Josh Homme.

An early impressionist painting by Claude Monet is a great example of the genre's use of light, shade and colour. Camille Monet on a Garden Bench shows three figures in the sunny garden near Monet's home. One is his wife Camille, one is a man in the black and the other, seemingly spying on the two, is an unknown woman.

The painting was completed in 1873.  On 23 September of that year, Camille was told that her father had died. In the painting, she seems to be holding a letter.  Is the man in black a messenger bringing the sad news? Does he represent death itself? Oddly, if that is the case, he seems to be smiling beneath his bushy beard. It seems that he is, in fact, Eugène Manet, younger brother of the artist Edouard. His image is used in a number of paintings of the time.

We do not know who the woman in the background is or why she is there, which gives the picture a pleasing sense of mystery. The painting marked a change in Monet's style. After The Bench, he never again completed a picture in which people are the main focus. The same year he painted The Luncheon, another large canvas of the same garden but people are mere background, with the bench and a table bearing the remains of the lunch in the foreground.