Love Letter from Balzac to Countess Ewelina Hańska

My beloved angel,

I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them.

I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you.

I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.

As for my heart, there you will always be - very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there.

But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason?

Lorenzo Bartolini | Buste d'Ewelina Hańska, 1837 | Musée Bertrand, à Châteauroux, France

Jacqueline Marval | The Female Fauve

Jacqueline Marval was the pseudonym for Marie Josephine Vallet (1866-1932), who was a French painter, lithographer and sculptor.

Vallet was born in Quaix-en-Chartreuse into a family of school teachers.

She was married in 1866, to a traveling salesperson, Albert Valentin, but separated from her husband in 1891 after the death of her son.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876

Bal du moulin de la Galette [Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette] is doubtless Renoir's most important work of the mid 1870's and was shown at the Impressionist exhibition in 1877.

Author: Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)

Title: Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette

Date: 1876

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: H. 131; W. 175 cm

Current location: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d'Orsay) / Jean-Gilles Berizzi

Hippolyte Flandrin | Neoclassical painter

Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864) was a French Neoclassical painter.

His most celebrated work, Jeune Homme Nu Assis au Bord de la Mer (1836) is held in the Louvre.

From an early age, Flandrin showed interest in the arts and a career as a painter.

He was the second of three sons, all of whom were painters.

Auguste, his older brother, spent most of his life as a professor at Lyon and later died there.

Bartolomeo Bezzi | Genre painter

Bartolomeo Bezzi (1851-1923) was an Italian painter.

Bartolomeo Bezzi was born in Fucine di Ossana (Trento), then in the Austrian Empire.

Having lost his father as a child, Bezzi lived with an uncle and enrolled at the Brera Academy in Milan at the age of twenty, exhibiting for the first time in 1878.

He won the Fumagalli Prize in 1882 and the following year he took part in the Esposizione di Belle Arti di Roma, receiving general acclaim for his landscape painting.

Theodore Earl Butler, l'impressionista americano a Parigi

Theodore Earl Butler (1861-1936) è stato un pittore impressionista Americano.

Nacque a Columbus, Ohio, e si trasferì a Parigi per studiare arte.

Conobbe Claude Monet a Giverny e ne sposò la figliastra, Suzanne Hoschedé.

Dopo la sua morte, sposò la sorella di lei, Marthe Hoschedé.

Butler fu uno dei membri fondatori della Society of Independent Artists.

Louis Janmot | Pittore simbolista

Louis Janmot (1814-1892) è stato un pittore e poeta Francese, appartenente alla Scuola di Lione, 1830 - un movimento ispirato alle correnti mistiche ed illuministe lionesi.

Louis Janmot è stato considerato una figura di transizione tra Romanticismo e Simbolismo, anticipando la componente francese della Confraternita dei Preraffaelliti; la sua opera fu ammirata da Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon e Maurice Denis.

Louis Janmot | Le Poème de l'âme. L’idéal, 1850-1854 | Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts

Jules Worms | The furtive message, 1877

In the "Furtive Message" Jules Worms (French academic painter, 1832-1924) re-creates a Spanish street as it might have appeared in the time of Goya.

The background is based on a watercolor sketch the artist made during an 1877 visit to Salamanca.

The picturesque setting forms a backdrop for a farce.

Jules Worms | The furtive message, 1877 | Haggin Museum, California