Treasures of the Lourve // Girl with a Pearl Earring

Fancy some reading before or after seeing these current exhibits?

Treasures of the Louvre [Legion of Honor until March 17, 2013]

Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

Interweaves historical fact with fiction to explore the mystery behind the creation of the remarkable Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, woven at the end of the fifteenth century, which today hang in the Cluny Museum in Paris.  Similar tapestries are part of the exhibition.

Abundance; a Novel of Marie Antoinette by Sena Jeter Nasland

With penetrant insight into new historical scholarship and with wondrous narrative skill, Naslund offers an intimate, fresh, and dramatic re-creation of this compelling woman that goes beyond popular myth. Abundance reveals a compassionate and spontaneous Marie Antoinette who rejected the formality and rigid protocol of the court; an enchanting and tenderhearted outsider who was loved by her adopted homeland and people until she became the target of revolutionary cruelty and violence; a dethroned queen whose depth of character sustained her in even the worst of times.  

Queen’s Lover; a novel by Francine du Plessix Gray

Francine du Plessix Gray’s beautifully realized historical novel reveals the untold love story between Swedish aristocrat Count Axel von Fersen and Marie Antoinette. The romance begins at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774, when the dashing nobleman first meets the mesmerizing nineteen-year-old dauphine, wife of the reclusive prince who will soon become Louis XVI. This electric encounter launches a love affair that will span the course of the French Revolution.

Girl with a Pearl Earring [ De Young until June 2, 2013]

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

A poor seventeenth-century servant girl knows her place in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer, but when he begins to paint her, nasty whispers and rumors circulate throughout the town.  Also a movie with the same title.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland

Chronicles the history of a painting and the lives with which it intersects, from the artist's inspiration to its admiration by two art scholars three hundred years later.

Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach

In Amsterdam in the 1630s, a young wife escapes her stifling marriage to an older man into the arms of the artist who is hired to paint their portrait

Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Chronicles the history of a painting and the lives with which it intersects, from the artist's inspiration to its admiration by two art scholars three hundred years later