Notes on Art

If a man throws himself out of the fourth floor window, and you can't make a sketch of him before he gets to the ground, you will never do anything big.
Eugène Delacroix

Before he had even had time to finish his first big painting, Delacroix was finding it increasingly difficult to find models, and the police had visited his fourth-floor studio seven times. Art, he deicded, was hard.

Updates Aplenty

I took the liberty of updating the theme to the new, easily-customized version. Unfortunately, I can't help thinking that it looks a lot worse than it used to (the post titles weren't underlined before, were they? And I don't know how to turn it off, either).

If somebody wants to fix it nobody will be happier than me (well, maybe the pope, but nobody else), but I'm starting to suspect that it wouldn't be completely unthinkable to chose an entirely new theme. Specifically, one wider than 700 pixels. We're living in the future, after all.

Ofelia Saunders and her Imaginary Saxophone Orchestra, Part One

“Then I saw the host of angels; their wings were like the wings of grasshoppers, and when they rubbed their wings together, this was the music of the spheres, which I had heard in my dreams, and which I hear today, in the sound of this wondrous instrument of Monsieur Sax's creation.”

An extract from the diary of Ms Saunders. The first page is missing.

Dream Rage

My Hypnagogic Memory Could Be Better

OK, here's how it is: I once saw a painting of the Jardin des Plantes. (I really couldn't tell you which Jardin des Plantes, but I would assume the Paris one.) I liked the picture. So, of course, I lost it. I can't remember the title, and I can't remember the artist's name. Annoying, but, you know, these things, they happen. Gravel along the roadside.

So, last night, I dreamt I was at an IKEA, and after buying a cheap misbound Rocky comic and a huge spool of strawberry cable I took to Wikipedia to while away the time waiting in line at the register (despite there being no line). Upon which I discovered the painter's name! I had just made a trivial misspelling, failing to duplicate a syllable. Then I woke up, and of course I can't remember the damn name anymore, but neither can I get the whole thing out of my head, now.
Whence this post; I turn to you, fellow Badgers and hypothetical other readers, for aid. Help me find the picture! Help me solve the riddle! (Of DOOM.) Some hints along the way, incidentally comprised of everything I know:

• I don't know whether the name in the dream is the correct one, of course, but it started with an A and was pretty long.
• The painting mainly depicts a tree-lined path leading down from a building, probably this one from a different angle, with amblers of a distinctly 19th/early 20th-century type on it. One of them is a woman with a parasol, I think. It's summer or early autumn. There may be a market or series of greenhouses on the left side.
  
• I first saw the picture in an old puzzle-laying game for Windows 95.
  
• The picture isn't Au Jardin des Plantes, by Henry Geoffroy, but I think the title is similar.
• But it probably isn't, because Googling such-type stuff has availed me not at all.

Now help me out before my brain explodes, dammit, you arty gobs!

No monkeys here either

Well, what do you know?* We did manage three posts in January.

I suggest that we try to do even better this month, and aim for a dazzling, staggering three posts per week. Starting next week, of course. One wouldn't want to overexert oneself, now would one?**

And yes, this is the first hint of a conspiracy to get us to post three times every second in June.

Footnotes:
*) This is a rhetorical question, but if you actually want to tell me what you know you are of course welcome.
**)This, on the other hand, is a genuine request for observations on whether one would, in fact, want to overexert oneself.