When Haussmann was busy tearing down and rebuilding large swathes of Paris, he wasn’t doing it all by himself. His chief engineer was this fellow, M Alphand. In this portrait by Alfred Roll, he is standing on the building site of the Petit Palais in 1888. Appropriately, it is now hanging in pride of place in the Petit Palais. As far as our history of art lecturer is aware, it is in the only portrait of an engineer in Paris.
The Petit Palais is an interesting place, although not as immediately so from a structural point of view as its glass-domed big brother opposite, the Grand Palais. This mock classical building has frescoes on its ceiling that, first time round, failed to draw my attention. On a second lap however, I was invited to take a closer look at these paintings. Sure, there were the cherubs floating around, but the clouds in which they were flying were not in fact clouds, but smoke rising from factories in one corner, and a steam train in the other. Progress!
kykcari
virgin mobile wild card