Abbaye de Flaran is an extremely well-preserved Cistercian Abbey just outside Valence-sur-Baïse in the département of Gers, south-west France. The abbey was founded in 1151 by Burgundian monks as a daughter house of Escaladieu Abbey in the Hautes-Pyrénées.

Abbaye de Flaran

It has had a turbulent history. It suffered damage during the Hundred Years War and a fire during the Wars of Religion. It was sold during the Revolution and transformed into a grain barn and a cellar for Armagnac. It underwent restoration in the eighteenth century to meet the needs of the religious community with a new dormitory and dining hall. However, it suffered fire again in 1970, after which it was bought and restored by the département du Gers and since 2000 it has housed the Departmental Heritage Conservation and Museum Conservatory.

Cloister of Abbaye de Flaran

However, once inside the abbey there is a surprise – the monks’ dormitory is also home to the Simonow collection of paintings and sculptures, which includes works by Claude Monet, Gustave Courbet, Auguste Rodin, Salvador Dali, Pierre Auguste Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others. It is an enormous collection, so the displays change periodically. Amongst those to be seen during my visit were:

Pierre Auguste Renoir ‘Portrait of Claude Monet’ (1875)

Claude Monet ‘Inondation à Giverny’ (1880s)

Paul Cezanne ‘Portrait of Paul Choquet’ (c.1880)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec ‘Vieil homme’ (c.1885)

Pierre Bonnard ‘Portrait of Andrée Bonnard’ (1887 – 88)

Auguste Rodin ‘Buste de Victor Hugo’ (late 19th century)

Walter Sickert ‘Portrait of Virginia Woolf’ (c.1914)

Suzanne Valadon ‘Nature morte au panier de fruits’ (1920)

André Derain ‘Nature morte aux grives’ (1923)

Chaïm Soutine ‘Portrait de jeune femme en rouge’ (c.1928)

Salvador Dali ‘Rhinocéros cosmique’ (1956)

At the Halle aux Grains in Toulouse for an evening of Beethoven and Mahler with the Orchestre National de Toulouse under the baton of Tarmo Peltokoski.

The concert began with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4, with soloist Alexandre Kantorow, a French pianist who has been described by Gramophone as a “fire-breathing virtuoso with a poetic charm”. He won the first prize and gold medal at the 16th International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019. He was also awarded the Grand Prix, an exceptional distinction only ever given three times before in the history of the competition. He reached a wider audience when, in 2024, he played at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris. He has toured the world with concerts throughout Europe, Asia and the United States of America.

The orchestra performed the piece well, with delicacy and warmth; however, it is a composition which allows the piano soloist to really demonstrate their skills and Alexandre Kantorow certainly did that. His performance brought sustained applause and he was called back to the stage four times, finally to play an encore of Franz Liszt’s transcription of Richard Wagner’s ‘Liebestod’ from ‘Tristan and Isolde’, which he played absolutely brilliantly. He is on next season’s programme twice and I look forward very much to seeing him perform again.

Tarmo Peltokoski and Alexandre Kantorow

The second half was a rousing rendition of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 6, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The symphony was composed during an extremely happy time in Mahler’s life, as he had married Alma just a couple of years before and during the course of the work’s composition, his second daughter was born. It is something of a conundrum then why the work has gained the nickname ‘Tragic’. It is likely that it reflects Mahler’s view of the tragedy of life and, if so, it would be only a year after the Sixth Symphony’s premiere in 1906 that he would be proved right, his ultimately fatal heart ailment was diagnosed, his four-year-old daughter Maria died, and he parted company, not on the best of terms, with the Vienna Opera.

The symphony is a monumental work which features well over one hundred musicians, including large brass and woodwind sections and eight percussionists, who appeared to be enjoying themselves enormously with timpani, cymbals, triangles, cowbells, glockenspiel and xylophone and, of course, the enormous wooden block and mallet.

After a rousing opening, the inner movements were played with great feeling with some beautiful sounds from the strings, but it is the tense and driving final movement that I enjoyed the most, leading to those mighty final hammer blows of doom. It was a spectacular event to end the season.

Ludwig van Beethoven ‘Concerto for Piano and Orchestra no. 4 in G Major’, opus 58; Gustav Mahler ‘Symphony no. 6 in A Minor’.

At the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec in Albi in south-west France for an exhibition of the works of Henri-Gabriel Ibels. Ibels, who was born in Paris in 1867, was a founder-member of the Nabis group of artists.

Ibels played a vital role in shaping the artistic and political spirit of the Nabi circle. As well as being a painter, poster designer and illustrator, he also worked as a journalist, and often used his art a a vehicle for political commentary.

Henri-Gabriel Ibels

Ibels became a close friend of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and they shared an interest in similar subjects, so it is fitting that the current exhibition is in the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec. The subjects of his paintings and posters include circus performers, the theatre, café life and political activists, as well as ordinary Parisians.

The exhibition is the first major retrospective devoted to Ibels and brings together more than 230 works, many of them rarely seen or newly restored.

Henri-Gabriel Ibels ‘Soldat à La Charité-sur-Loire’ (undated)

Henri-Gabriel Ibels ‘Au café-concert’ (1892 – 93)

Henri-Gabriel Ibels ‘Le Coup de Piston’ (undated)

Henri-Gabriel Ibels ‘Scene de cirque, Clown de dos’ (1893)

Henri-Gabriel Ibels ‘L’affiche de L’Escarmouche’ (1893)

Henri-Gabriel Ibels ‘Salon des Cents’ (1894)

Henri-Gabriel Ibels ‘Yvette Guilbert sur scene’ (1894)

Henri-Gabriel Ibels ‘Clown’ (1895)

Henri-Gabriel Ibels ‘Les Naiades’ (1897)

Henri-Gabriel Ibels ‘Le Pardon’ (1910)

This excellent exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, co-produced with the Centre Pompidou, examines the artist’s final years of creation, highlighting the multidisciplinary nature of his work during this period, which included paintings, drawings, cut-outs, textiles and stained glass.

The exhibition brings together around 300 works from the holdings of the Centre Pompidou and private and international museum collections, illustrating the artist’s output from 1941 until his death in 1954.

It is sometimes supposed that towards the end of his life Matisse abandoned painting and took up instead the medium of the cut-out. However, as this exhibition shows, despite his declining health, painting remained at the heart of his practice alongside the use of the cut-out gouache, as well as other materials such as stained-glass and fabric. The exhibition displays materials from a diverse range of projects, including the Chapelle de Vence, his book ‘Jazz’ and several monumental decorative panels.

Henri Matisse ‘The Romanian Blouse’ (1940)

Henri Matisse ‘Young Girl in White Dress, Black Door’ (1942)

Henri Matisse ‘Icarus’ from ‘Jazz’ (1943)

Henri Matisse ‘Polynesia. The Sea’ (1946)

Henri Matisse ‘Polynesia. The Sky’ (1946)

Henri Matisse ‘Asia’ (1946)

Henri Matisse ‘Composition Black and Red’ (1947)

Henri Matisse ‘Plum Branch, Green Background’ (1948)

Henri Matisse ‘Creole Dancer’ (1950)

Henri Matisse ‘Sorrow of the King’ (1952)

Henri Matisse ‘Blue Nude II’ (1952)

Henri Matisse ‘Blue Nudes I – IV’ (1952)

Henri Matisse ‘Blue Nude with Skipping Rope’ (1952)

Henri Matisse ‘The Snail’ (1953)

Henri Matisse ‘The Sheaf’ (1953)

Károly Ferenczy (1862–1917) is little known outside Hungary but in his homeland he occupies a central place in the history of Hungarian modernism. He first trained in Munich and later at the Académie Julian in Paris. Whilst in Paris Ferenczy absorbed influences from Naturalism, Impressionism, Symbolism, and Post-Impressionism, yet never belonged entirely to any single movement.

He was a founding figure of the artists’ colony at Nagybánya in Hungary (today Baia Mare, Romania), which helped shape a distinctly modern Hungarian school of painting. There he championed plein-air painting and encouraged other artists to work directly from nature. As well as his landscapes, Ferenczy also explored family portraits, biblical scenes and nudes.

The current exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest and the Hungarian National Gallery, displays around 140 paintings, and offers a comprehensive survey of Ferenczy’s career.

Károly Ferenczy ‘Young Women attending to Flowers’ (1889)

Károly Ferenczy ‘Young Boys throwing Pebbles’ (1890)

Károly Ferenczy ‘Before the Posters’ (1891)

Károly Ferenczy ‘Gardeners’ (1891)

Károly Ferenczy ‘Self-Portrait’ (1893)

Károly Ferenczy ‘Birdsong’ (1893)

Károly Ferenczy ‘Orpheus’ (1894)

Károly Ferenczy ‘Sermon on the Mount’ (1896)

Károly Ferenczy ‘Top of the Hill’ (1901)

Károly Ferenczy ‘Double Portrait (Noémi and Béni)’ (1908)

Károly Ferenczy ‘The Red Wall’ (1910)

Károly Ferenczy ‘Triple Portrait (The Artist’s Children)’ (1911)

Károly Ferenczy ‘Athletes’ (1915)

The galleries of Greek and Roman antiquities in the Louvre are one of the highlights of the museum. They contain an extremely impressive collection of sculptures including the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

‘Ingres Minerva’ (440 BC)

‘Athena Parthenos’ (438 BC)

‘Artemis, known as the Diana of Versailles’ (200 BC)

‘Pergamon vase’ (200 BC)

‘The Winged Victory of Samothrace’ (190 BC)

‘Venus de Milo’ (159 – 130 BC)

At the Louvre for the exhibition ‘Martin Schongauer. Le bel immortel’. Martin Schongauer, who was born in Colmar around 1445, was one of the most successful Germanic artists of the fifteenth century. Although he is not as well known today as some of his contemporaries such as Albrecht Durer he was extremely influential during his lifetime; in fact, it was Durer who nicknamed him ‘Beautiful Martin’.

This is the first exhibition to assemble nearly the entire surviving body of Schongauer’s paintings alongside a major selection of his drawings and engravings. It is organized into two major sections. The first retraces the artist’s life, his training and his achievements as both painter and engraver. The second section looks at his extraordinary influence on European artists from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. When Michelangelo was 12 or 13 he made a copy of Schongauer’s ‘The Torment of Saint Anthony’ (c.1469 – 73), an engraving so full of fantastical demonic beasts that it also had an impression on Hieronymus Bosch. Schongauer also had his own influences of course, one of which was Rogier van der Weyden, one of my favourite artists, and it was a treat to see his ‘Braque Family Triptych’ at the exhibition.

Rogier van der Weyden ‘Braque Family Triptych’ (central panel, c.1450)

Rogier van der Weyden ‘Braque Family Triptych’ (side panels, c.1450)

In 1490, when Albrecht Dürer, was 19, he finished his apprenticeship and set off from his native Nuremberg on his Wanderjahre (wandering years). In 1492 he reached Colmar where he hoped to meet Martin Schongauer. But whilst he was warmly received by three of Martin’s brothers, they had to inform him that the artist had died the year before in Breisach am Rhein, where he had been working on murals in Saint Stephansmünster church.

Martin Schongauer ‘Christ Blessing’ (c.1470)

Martin Schongauer ‘Saint Anthony tormented by Demons’ (1470 – 75)

Martin Scongauer ‘The Death of the Virgin’ (1470 – 75)

Martin Schongauer ‘Orlier Altarpiece’ open (c.1472)

Martin Schongauer ‘Orlier Altarpiece’ closed (c.1472)

Martin Schongauer ‘Madonna of the Rose Bower’ (1473)

Martin Scongauer ‘The Great Procession of the Cross’ (c.1479)

Martin Scongauer ‘The Nativity with the Adoration of the Shepherds’ (c.1480)

Martin Schongauer ‘Noli mi tangere’ (1480)

Martin Schongauer ‘The Thurible’ (c.1485)

Martin Schongauer ‘Madonna and Child in the Window’ (c.1485 – 90)

A few days in Paris for some excellent exhibitions, starting at the Musée Jacquemart-André for an exhibition of Hispanic Baroque painting, featuring Golden Age artists including El Greco, Francisco de Zurbarán and Diego Velázquez.

The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Hispanic Society of America in New York and is part of a collection that has been on tour at various locations throughout the USA and Europe. It was, therefore, a little disappointing to find that at its sole appearance in France the exhibition only comprised some forty paintings, whereas when it appeared at the Prado, Madrid and the Royal Academy, London there were around 200 items, including paintings, sculpture and ceramics from a much wider time period. Nevertheless, what was on display was fascinating to see and there were some excellent examples of Spanish baroque painting.

El Greco ‘Pietà’ (c.1574 – 76)

Anonymous Spanish artist ‘Philippe II et ses enfants’ (c.1581 – 84)

El Greco ‘Saint Luke’ (c.1590)

Alonso Vazquez ‘Saint Sebastien’ (c.1603 – 07)

Fray Alfonso López de Herrera ‘Immaculée Conception’ (1640)

Juan Carreño de Miranda ‘Portrait of Philippe IV, roi d’Espagne’ (c.1645 – 50)

Francisco de Zurbarán ‘Saint Emerentiana’ (c.1635 – 40)

Francisco de Zurbarán ‘Saint Lucy’ (c.1630)

Diego Velázquez ‘Portrait of a Little Girl’ (c.1638 – 42)

Sebastian Munoz ‘Marie-Louise d’Orleans en chapelle ardente’ (1689 – 90)

Nicholás Correa ‘Les Noces de Cana’ (1696)

The Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne has been described by renowned art historian Pierre Rosenberg as housing “the most beautiful collection between Paris and Madrid”. Known as the ‘Little Louvre’, it reopened at the end of 2025 after a fourteen-year expansion and renovation costing €35 million.

Founded in 1891, the museum was named after the two painters, Léon Bonnat and Paul César Helleu, whose bequests of their works and collections between 1922 and 2011 laid the foundation for the museum, which is now home to around 7,000 works, spanning from Antiquity to the twentieth century. The museum’s graphic arts collection is one of the best in the world with more than 3,500 works on paper by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Ingres, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and Paolo Veronese.

Maître de Bonnat ‘Saint Martin’ (c.1475)

El Greco ‘Presumed Portrait of the Duke of Benavente’ (1597 – 1603)

El Greco ‘Saint Jerome’ (c.1590 – 1610)

José de Ribera ‘Desperate Woman’ (1638)

Francisco de Goya ‘Self-Portrait with Spectacles’ (c.1800)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres ‘ The Bather’ (1807)

Théodore Géricault ‘Study of a Male Nude’ (1812 – 17)

Edgar Degas ‘Portrait of Léon Bonnat’ (c.1863)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres ‘The Virgin of the Host’ (1866)

John Singer Sargent ‘Portrait of Paul Helleu’ (c.1880)

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes ‘Sweet Country’ (1882)

Juan Manuel Fernández Montoya, known throughout the world of flamenco as Farruquito, has been described by the New York Times as “the best flamenco dancer of this century.” He was born in Seville in 1982 and began dancing at the age of five, when he shared the stage with his grandfather, El Farruco, who was known as the greatest gypsy dancer of the twentieth century. Farruquito has graced stages throughout the world, in Europe and Asia, the United States and Latin America.

Farruquito

Tonight he performed at the Salle Lauga in Bayonne, where he was supported by Manuel Valencia on guitar, Paco Véga on percussion and singers Maria Vizarraga, Ismaël de la Rosa and Pepe de Pura.

It was an extraordinary performance. Farruquito’s dancing is a whirlwind of passion and emotion but with great rhythmic precision. However, the success of the show was the amazing interaction between dance, cante, guitar and percussion. All three singers were impressive but Maria Vizarraga’s incredibly powerful vocals almost stole the show, whilst Manuel Valencia’s guitar solos were outstanding. It was a wonderfully entertaining evening that ended with a deserved standing ovation.