Posts about Docent Essays
Special essays written by the docents of Context Travel.
While the Marais has grown in popularity with tourists over the past ten years, the Faubourg-Saint Antoine – a little-visited neighborhood just across the Place de la Bastille — remains the province of Parisians. The neighborhood stretches along the boundary of the eleventh and twelfth arrondissements and is bisected by the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine (not to be confused with the rue Saint-Antoine in the Marais). Faubourg Saint-Antoine has long been a district of craftsmen. Woodworkers and furniture makers have concentrated their workshops here since the fifteenth century and the neighborhood is still home to a robust design and artisan community.
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Posted by Lily | This post has 2 comments
March 11th, 2010 under Architecture, Art, Budget Conscious Travel, City Life, Context Travel, Culture, Docent Essays, Food and Wine, History, Paris, Shopping.
I always enjoy chatting with our docents. They always manage to highlight a different aspect of the city we work in.
Whether the Drawing cabinet of the British Museum or the hidden culinary spots in central London, there is always a lot to learn. Recently I sat down with Michael Mulryan. Michael, PhD in Ancient History, specializes in late antique Rome but is interested in ancient and medieval urbanism in general, and the transition between the two. Read more »
Posted by Petulia | This post has 2 comments
January 11th, 2010 under Archaeology, City Life, Context Travel, Culture, Docent Essays, History, London.
We caught up with Context docent and art historian Page Knox the other day. She was breathless as she recounted her recent discovery of the new “American Stories” exhibition at the Met, an amazingly comprehensive show, covering nearly 200 years of American history and art. We asked her to give us some details.
Context: What can we expect from “American Stories”?
Page Knox: This is the first major exhibition of American genre painting at the Metropolitan, and it offers a wide range of many iconic national images. Divided into four sections, the exhibition presents pictures of everyday life in the colonial period, the antebellum years, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age, examining the evolution of genre painting from the American Revolution to Pre World War I.
Context: Is there a theme that holds it together?
Page Knox: Definitely. The exhibition explores how artists in America responded to the nation’s transformation, from a rural and agricultural society to an urban, industrial world power, and the new challenges it faced in terms of changing family structures, population growth and immigration, and racial division. With an emphasis on pictures that portray accounts of daily life, the show includes well-known images from major painters in the Met’s collection and other important works from museums nationwide, including paintings by John Singleton Copley, Charles Wilson Peale, George Caleb Bingham, William Sidney Mount, Richard Caton Woodville, Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Frederick Remington and John Sloan; some lesser known artists are also featured to provide a sense of what was also popular at the time.
Context: Do you have some favorites?
Page Knox: Well, the show includes some of the most beautiful and beloved paintings in the history of American art, such as Homer’s Veteran in a New Field, Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, and Mary Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair to name but a few. I also really like the Chase Ring Toss. But, mainly, it’s just impressing that a show of this vast scope is being mounted during such tough times. As the Times noted this week, “This gathering of ‘iconic’ works is unlikely to happen again anytime soon.”
Context: Are we including the show in our American Wing at the Met walk?
Page Knox: We can definitely combine it with a brief visit to American wing or the small exhibition of Hudson River School landscapes at the Lehmen wing, but not both unless they really want a quick general overview of the last two.
Context: Exciting!
Page Knox is a Ph.D. candidate in American art at Columbia University with a focus on late-nineteenth-century painting. She is one of several art historians who lead Context New York’s American Wing at the Met walk.
Posted by Paul Bennett | This post has one comment
October 20th, 2009 under Art, Context Travel, Culture, Docent Essays, New York.
Context Paris is the happy to announce its new office at 67 rue Réaumur. I’d always admired this intriguing street but knew nothing about it. When I told Bernie where we’d moved, he informed me that it was the subject of his dissertation - I couldn’t resist inquiring more about this rue and he gracious wrote us this interesting introduction…
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Posted by Lily | This post has 5 comments
September 21st, 2009 under Architecture, Context Travel, Docent Essays, History, Paris.
Venice, more than any other city, is dependent upon and simultaneously threatened by its natural environment. Ecologists often use the word symbiosis to describe relationships between organisms. For one thousand years, Venice and her lagoon exhibited a form of mutually beneficial symbiosis; without the lagoon, Venice would never have survived, and without Venetians, the lagoon would be a historical artifact found only in old maps and in sedimentary records. Read more »
Posted by Jessica | This post has 2 comments
August 30th, 2008 under City Life, Culture, Docent Essays, History, Venice.
For the modern visitor to Florence, it is easy to enjoy the city as it stands today, and forget the war-like parts of its history. The Battle of Monteperti in 1260, when Florence was defeated and nearly destroyed by the other Tuscan cities, the endless faction-fighting between Guelphs and Ghibellines, and the siege of 1530 that made the Medicis the rulers of Tuscany all seem very remote as you stroll about the Uffizi under the placid gaze of Renaissance saints, and enjoy your bistecca fiorentina in a quiet trattoria. But Florence has preserved a most interesting reminder of its bellicose past, the “calcio storico fiorentino - historical Florentine soccer”, a no-holds-barred soccer game with very few rules and a lot of violence, which forms part of the city’s annual celebration of its patron saint, John the Baptist. Read more »
Posted by Megan | This post has 3 comments
July 2nd, 2008 under Culture, Docent Essays, Florence, Special Events.
Rome is becoming trendy! This is the buzz word in the contemporary art world, at least here in Rome, where the much anticipated recent opening of Gagosian Gallery is considered a sign that Rome has finally reemerged as a cosmopolitan cultural capital – a new caput mundi. Read more »
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February 8th, 2008 under Art, Culture, Docent Essays, Museums and Monuments, Rome, Special Events.
Gambling in Venice is big business and has been for centuries, millennia even. As far back as the twelfth century Doge Ziani had given Nicolò Starantonio, aka Barattieri (barter), a prime location in Saint Mark’s Square for his gambling tables.
The story goes that the columns at the entrance to Saint Mark’s Square had originally been brought back from the Levant in the twelfth century by a previous doge. Having already lost one overboard whilst it was being unloaded, the other two, being too heavy and tall for the Venetian engineering of the day, were left to lie neglected for decades. Read more »
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January 15th, 2008 under Culture, Docent Essays, History, Museums and Monuments, Venice.
A society as unique and complex as Venice’s has historically garnered much attention from foreigners. As a city bustling with commerce and politics, travelers flocked there as pilgrims, ambassadors, and leisure travelers. Their written accounts are invaluable tools for modern historians searching to reconstruct Renaissance Venice. Read more »
Posted by Jessica | This post has no comments
June 22nd, 2007 under Art, Culture, Docent Essays, History, Museums and Monuments, Venice.
Springtime is all about celebration. The sun comes out once again, the weather warms up, and everyone looks toward summer. In Italy, the first warm Sunday in spring is an amazing thing. For the first time in months, people venture out of the house without their scarves and heavy coats, and throngs of people go for a passeggiata, which is meant less for exercise and more to see and be seen. Still more linger for a drink in an outdoor cafe; the heat lamps turned off so people can again be warmed by the sun alone. Read more »
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March 1st, 2007 under Docent Essays, Food and Wine, Rome.
