Word: gaspard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Napoleon's young aide-de-camp, General Gaspard Gourgaud, left a journal describing the Emperor's last years on St. Helena, a speck of British territory in the South Atlantic. Gourgaud's entries, unintentionally hilarious, record the great man's stupendous banality after he lost the thing that made him interesting -- his power. "October 21 (1815). I walk with the Emperor in the garden, and we discuss women. He maintains that a young man should not run after them . . . November 5. The Grand Marshal (Montholon) is angry because the Emperor told him he was nothing but a ninny . . . January...
...wonder that, in a painter with so pronounced a taste for the specific, there was a constant argument between stereotypes and things seen. Constable loved his masters: Claude Lorrain, Ruisdael, Gaspard Poussin. Some of his most delectable paintings, such as The Cornfield, 1826, rely on the Claudean use of dark repoussoir trees framing a view of bright space at the center, and this can make them too charming to a modern eye. Constable himself remarked that The Cornfield "has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give." But the great fact of nature, as Benjamin West...
...struggle up the snowy folds of Mont Blanc looking like a necklace of chocolate chips dropped into a vanilla sundae. Meanwhile, journalistic history is displayed in a set of pictures and captions from the first interview ever recorded (in 1886) for both eye and ear. The cameramen-interviewers are Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who worked under the single professional name Nadar, and his son Paul. Their subject is Michel-Eugène Chevreul, an elderly scientist and expert on the theory of color mixing. Visible in some frames: a tubular machine that recorded Chevreul's words...