The French are passionate about their dogs… I think I adore my dog… I know I do… but not quite in the same way as the French. Look at the ‘baby’ in this print taking pride of place at the table and being hand fed… Can you imagine my 100kg Apache (thankfully he hasn’t gained any more weight) sitting up with us at the dining table being seduced by bite-sized morsels… I am not sure if I am laughing or terrified at the thought…
One of my readers from North Carolina, David Terry, who you may recognise from his charming, funny and very entertaining comments has so generously offered to send you and readers of My French Country Home a printable size file of this gorgeous engraving. All you have to do is click here and follow his lead…
Do you know what I really love most about blogging? It is the chance to meet and make friendships with people from all over the world who share my love of all things French. I wrote a little more about this here today… I am constantly touched by the generosity and thoughtfulness of my readers… I feel as if we are great friends and that we understand each other well. In many cases it is as if we have known each other all our lives and that the physical boundaries are meaningless.
P.S from David… a little history behind the print…
“Just for the record? I just got up (6:30 a.m back here in the USA) and was surprised to find that I’ve received something around twenty emails since last checking before I went to bed at midnight. They’re all requests for the dog-print. I’d forgotten about the time-difference between here and France.
As for the “story” behind the print?…..
I first saw it, about 8 years ago, at the fascinating house of my French partner’s godmother. Francoise is a fiercely wry, 5′ tall (at MOST), retired professor of classical Languages. We always stay at her and her husband’s house, out in the countryside beyond Tours, for a few days during our summer and Christmas trips to France. Francoise maintains a large pigeonaire which has always been filled with with fifty or so white doves….terribly stupid, but quite beautiful; I’ve painted them at least six times over the years.
the house itself is wonderful/fascinating…..a 17th century manoir with an 18th century, 2-story, cottage-like addition (originally a kitchen and housekeeper’s quarters) and an enormous, long, 2-story 16th century stone barn which tiny (but wildly energetic) Francoise somehow had moved (don’t ask me how) and added on, at a perpendicular angle. She raised three children…..so their bedrooms were upstairs, and they had the entire ground floor for themselves. As Francoise says, locking them in at night, once they turned into teenagers-with-idea-of-their-won, was as simple as locking-in three young heifers.
The print hangs in the large dining-room (the old “cottage”), along with about twenty prints from the same series…all depicting the various follies, eccentricities, and vanities of the haute bourgoisie (the bibliophile, the gourmande, the obese and inept “sportsman”,the woman obsessed with shoes or hats, etcetera). they’re all quite funny and, for the most part, not in the LEAST outdated in terms of social criticism. La plus ca change?….
Francoise obligingly knocked the original print out of its frame and had the thing deep-scanned for me.
More interestingly/romantically? It’s a well-known fact (Francoise’s mother knew the woman in question) that the house was inhabited, prior to WWII, by a young woman who was a poet. Her lover was an Englishman…an artist who (to the scandal of the neighborhood) came to live there in the late thirties.
The war came and, of course, he went back to England to join up with the army. On one of the casement panes in the dining-room window, there’s a rather large (perhaps 6″ by 8″) engraving…presumably done with a diamond ring. The engraved poem and it’s floral border are dated only a few days after the German invasion of Paris. The woman was evacuating for Bordeaux (I’ve always relished Adam Gopnik’s description of Bordeaux as “the place where French always go to give up”), and she knew that she might never see him again….but that he might, one day, see the poem, even if she were gone. That is, in short, the gist of the poem itself (which she wrote in English for him). She did, eventually and after the war, return…and lived there for many years thereafter. He, however, never did return. She never married.
The story’s a bit too romantic for cynical me (or Francoise, for that matter) to believe….but there the engraving (proof) is.
As for these prints? I’ve given away at least ten (to various friends who, like me, are a bit abashed to admit how thoroughly obsessed they are with their dogs), and folks love them. Be sure to have the print made professionally (Kinko’s copy-shop generally isn’t up to snuff) at a framers or print-makers. If printed at 10″ x 12″, the print will be indistinguishable from the original.”
