Keith and Christine would love to hear from you with questions, comments, personal news and any news at all from Australia or wherever you are. We will reply to all emails! Please write to either windlechristine@gmail.com or windle.keith@gmail.com I am writing this and the next few days some time after the events, having been lulled into lazy starts and tourist days in this darling town of Bayonne. It has everything and we feel very much at home here. Each day we think of something to do and it is always in do-able walking, cycling or bus trip distance for us. After my one experience of the impersonal ‘haut marche’, which has everything and then some more, we have preferred to buy our supplies at the local shop where we are greeted as friends and have a chat twice a day. Catherine is a very kind and helpful landlady and we get on well. Jan comes and goes to his skating, but is ever helpful with language, with our main conversations being in the mornings and evenings.
Today, we left the cat to do the dishes as we set off to the Bonnat Museum of Bayonne.
We skirted the old castle where the parked motorbikes provided another example of the juxtaposition of old and new here.
We crossed the Nive river onto the triangle between the Nive and the Adour rivers. An austere building proclaimed itself to be the ‘Mixed Public Primary School of Little Bayonne’, making a set for us of the school buildings of former times, since we had already seen the equally forbidding old Secondary schools for boys and for girls. The museum is in a very grand building, whose two classical style statues above the door are posed in such a way that they could be any teenagers today.
Inside there is a central gallery with a sunken sitting area in the middle. Stairs lead up to many connecting rooms on the first and second floors. Louis Bonnat, for whom the gallery is named, was a famous artist who was born in Bayonne in 1833. His father died while he was a child and after that the city of Bayonne twice financially supported his artistic studies. He was a painter of tableaux and of portraits of many people, including Victor Hugo, Louis Pasteur and Barye, the sculptor. He was also a supporter of other artists and a collector of antiquities and art works. It was his dream to have a museum of art at Bayonne and he gave part of his collection to establish it in 1901. The rest followed after his death in 1922. His collection was actually left to the state, but on the condition that it be displayed in Bayonne. Sitting in the centre of the downstairs gallery, we could examine the triptych, painted of Leon Bonnat, with his artist friends, some his famous contemporaries and some his students. It is painted in the fauve style, is full of light colours and dappled brushwork, and the artists are all formally dressed, to our eye, for a get-together by river. There is only one woman and Bonnat looks like a banker or a member of the British royal family. In 1923 a statue of Bonnat was placed in front of the town hall at Bayonne but in 1943 it was taken by the Germans during the occupation and melted down. The Museum was renovated between 1974 and 1979, and is an absolute pleasure to visit.
We started on the second floor, where private collectors, Monsieur and Madame Milgrom, had lent thirty-two of their pieces for display. The exhibition was prefaced with a thought provoking piece about the nature of collecting and of selecting paintings to buy. It was not unlike the discussion about photography at the Basque Museum, but carried it a step further, since all elements of a painting are chosen by the painter and then the collector comes into it with his priorities and agendas. Finally, by selecting from a collection, what we see has yet again been subjected to an intellectual sifting process. To encourage thought about these issues, many of the paintings had questions projected onto the floor or wall relating to details, motivations of the characters portrayed, artistic intent and the stylistic fashions of the day.
All painting amazes me – that anyone could envisage the effect of paint, relate it to distance and form, consider the accumulated impact of strokes, colours and light, and then actually do it is just incredible. We spent several hours here really looking into the paintings in great depth, quite apart from whether they appealed to us or not. The ‘Portrait of a Magistrate’, by Jean-Baptise Jouvenet, was accompanied by notes regarding the letter in his hand – what had he just learnt? It was painted very early in the 18th century, at a time when painters had moved beyond representing the physical and the symbolic, and were concerned to express psychological states as well. In contrast, the portrait of Cardinal de Richelieu, painted in the 17th century by Philippe de Champaigne, is static and has the traditional, but unnatural, pose of one extended finger.
We are now so much better able to pick out references to bible stories and many of these paintings had biblical themes. In one, the holy family is passing some ruins in Egypt and we wondered if we had seen the same ones. Another, by Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, showed Jesus with the Cannanean, who is asking his help because her daughter is afflicted. The museum’s question directed us to a man sitting beneath a tree, who is speaking to two peasants passing by. What is he saying? That simple question prompted us to think of the political, religious and social setting of the painting. Another painting of Moses being let go on the waters by Nicolas Colombel, was equally interesting in foreground and background when viewed in this broader light, and surprised us with what looked to be a stray nude sunbaker in the gloom over to one side. There is so much to know and to understand regarding symbolism, tradition and common understandings that we don’t share – and want to know more about. It feels as if I am just starting out in so many fields of knowledge and interest but it is impossible not to be stimulated into interest when there is the time and the opportunity to ‘open the doors’.
An exhibition of art from the Middle Ages showed the heavy leaning to religious themes and no tiptoeing around gruesome topics such as ‘The Decapitation of Saint Fabien’. This was one in a series which also showed his election as pope, which was unanimous despite many other worthies being considered, because a dove happened to land on his head. A beautiful painting shows St Martin, dressed in medieval style, giving his warm cloak to a poor man, who is really Jesus. 
A room was devoted to Rubens, with sketches and some paintings. The studies were complex and beautiful. Tapestries from the 16th century were like paintings and it was during the Renaissance that tapestry makers were for the first time asked to make a tapestry of a painting, as opposed to always creating their own designs.
Much of the museum is devoted to the French School of artists from the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries. A wonderful and very touching painting, La Charite Romaine by Simon Vouet, shows a young girl feeding her imprisoned father.
The room of Spanish artists had several paintings by El Greco including his St Jerome’, a self-portrait by Goya which we had seen as prints and a sad and impossible to walk by painting of ‘Femme Desesperee’, which was painted by Jose de Ribera, which was painted after the artist’s daughter had been violated.
After looking at some very elaborate, small sculptures from the French school, nearly all of which were on classical themes, we were at the ground floor, where the paintings by Bonnat were displayed, along with the sculpted busts of many famous French artists. Bonnat was a prolific painter and thinker, and his paintings are absolutely marvellous.
After this treat, Keith stayed home while Catherine and I went to the sports store to select some good mountain walking shoes for me. The summer sale was on but, of course, the shoes that suited my feet were regular price. Equally in the furniture store, pieces were reduced but none that suited Catherine’s taste. These big stores are in Englet, a nearby town that seems to be mostly light industrial and a big store and factory outlets centre, but which must have an old heart somewhere.
After a quick tea, Catherine, Keith and I went to a film in the summer film festival. Called ‘The Trip to the Pyrenees’, it featured two well respected French actors who should have known better that to sign up for it. The story line of a couple of comedians getting away from it all, with the husband secretly hoping to cure the wife of her nymphomaniac tendencies, and of a mysterious bear in the region, just didn’t cut it. It wasn’t just our lack of ability to pick up the subtleties of the comedy because there was very little laughter from the other fifteen or so people who had been foolish enough to come. Once three friars had been added bathing nude, and the bear turned out to be a man, the film descended even further into desperate ‘time on’ land. We all agreed that it was a pretty stupid film and that the one thing worth going for had been the magnificent scenery of the Pyrenees, where we would be going walking the next day.
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