Gentle Friends, after the Atelier I had two more places, St Ambroise and Pere Lachaise...I wanted to visit and they are both over in this part of Paris...I had my map and directions and first up is St Ambroise...
... this lovely neo-gothic church was built between 1863-68. St Ambroise replaced an earlier church called Notre-Dame de la Procession... there is a super public park in front. It is a newish church for Paris but really high style gothic for the mid-19th century...
... looking down the nave towards the high altar...
... a very Italian looking altar, it so reminds me of the altars I've seen in Florence...
... there's really no ambulatory behind the altar, but there is a lovely chapel...
... some of the windows...
... one of the transepts with the small rose and Saints windows...notice the heavy bronze chandeliers...
... the Lady Chapel, with original frescoed walls, as with many large historic spaces, this church needs quite a bit of restoration work...
...after leaving the church I continued my walking north-east towards my next destination...
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Pere Lachaise Cemetary. I have been meaning to get here for years. It is always on my list and I have just never been able to make the time ...it just never seemed to happen, but this trip it happened...
.... the is the main entrance to the cemetery, I came in from a side entrance but left through these gates... specifically to get this shot of the front gates...
... the cemetery is built on a hill and was one of the first "Garden Cemeteries" built in France
.... I had a list of graves I really wanted to find... and with over a million burials I had a map in hand and even then some of them were really hard to find!!.... but here go the ones I did find...
... the neo-classical french painter ... Jacques-Louis David...
... this is the grave of Louis Alphonse, Comte de Rayneval (1814-58) he was a French Politician and Foreign Minister to Spain and Russia... I just liked the massive solidness of this one!!
... the French Romantic painter... Eugene Delacroix...
... Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, another romantic painter and a painter of society portraits...
... just another great shot of the memorials in the graveyard...
... these next two people were not originally buried here but their remains were moved here in 1804 as a marketing strategy. Since no one wanted to be buried so far from Paris... the administrators of Pere Lachaise at the time organized the transfer of the remains of... Moliere (above) and Jean de la Fontaine (below) such huge luminaries of French literature!!! These graves, although they look easy to see they were really hard to find as they are sort of behind another block of graves... I was determined and stubborn!!
... this monument is the grave of Oscar Wilde... and was easy to find. He was initially buried in a cemetery outside of Paris. In 1909 his remains were disinterred and transferred to Pere Lachaise, inside the City. This tomb was designed by Sir Jacob Epstein. It was commissioned by Robert Ross, who asked for a small compartment to made for his own ashes, which were duly transferred in 1950. In 2011, the tomb was cleaned of the many lipstick marks left there by admirers and a glass barrier was installed to prevent further marks or damage
... I went looking for Simone Signoret, I loved her in "Ship of Fools" and when I eventually found her grave I found that she was buried next to Yves Montand her second husband...simple and elegant...
... Georges Melies, a Director of early films...
... I found the family vault of Georges Seurat, a pointillist painter who was interred here in 1891...
... and I wrapped up my visit to the graveyard by visiting the grave of Colette.
This is a big place and since it's on a hill, you're either walking up or you're walking uphill... I felt that I was always walking uphill... it never seemed to be I was walking downhill. So glad I made the time and visited.
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There you go sports fans, thanks for stopping by do stop again!!
Take care,
edgar
As always, beautiful photos and great commentary. I'm glad you included the cemetery - perhaps it will inspire others to visit that one as well as others.
ReplyDeleteThe stained glass is stunning.
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful Church and interesting cemetery.
ReplyDeleteAmazing cemetery! The church is nothing to sneeze at either! I've never been interested in seeing the insides of churches until I started following your blog:) About the tomb with lipstick, I'm amazed that the fans aren't just kissing the protective case! In New Orleans, Nicolas Cage has a tomb already in one of the well known cemeteries where women kiss it also. We were told he goes to visit and clean the lipstick off!
ReplyDeleteDearest Edgar: It makes my heart happy to see such beautiful photos, I am a lover of stain glass, it is so lovely, we have a Lady in our CCW group who did a research on the windows at St. Ignatious Church, we did a walk around to see all the lovely things in each window and learned of their meaning.
ReplyDeleteThank-you for sharing your vacation with us.
Catherine