In the summer between my junior and senior year in high school I was a privileged white kid from Williston, ND, attending a summer course on Romanticism, at St Olaf College, Northfield, MN. It was mostly literature, but there was a fair amount of art, music, and theater.
We were not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, and my father certainly would not have had any connection with fine art (or any art for that matter) or literature. Why he was willing to spend that much money to let me take this course I will never understand. I do remember bits and pieces of the long car ride from Williston to Minneapolis (and return). I don't recall staying overnight anywhere along the way, so we must have made the trip (each way) in one long stretch. If so, we would stopped along the way to eat summer sausage sandwiches on white bread prepared by my mother. We certainly would not have had the money to eat at a restaurant. My dad drove, my mom went with us, and I vaguely recall one other sibling in the car.
I can count on my two hands the number of life-altering events in my life and that eight-week course was one of them. There were so many highlights -- one of them was seeing not less than two plays at the Guthrie Theater (I can't remember if we saw two or three; it's possible we saw only one, but if so, it must have been overwhelming and awe-inspiring because it registers as not less than two plays in my mind).
We studied a lot of paintings from that period. I do not recall visiting an art museum but I certainly recall all the paintings we saw displayed on some kind of big screen projection. The screen shot on this page is the painting that stood out most at the time and still haunts me. It may be the one painting, followed by Monet's lily pond paintings, that really affected my life in a very positive way.
I never understood the painting, and I'm not sure I understand it today. My understanding of French history was never any good. I probably know Chinese history better than French history. Whatever.
The interesting thing is that I instantly recognize this painting and its painter, Eugene De La Croix, whenever I see it (although I had to look up the spelling of the painter's name to make sure I had it right).
An aside: Sophia just returned from a catamaran-sailing trip in the US Virgin Islands. She tells me she visited St Thomas, St John, and St Croix islands. In fact, St Croix (Holy Cross) was too far for them on this trip so she only saw St Thomas and St John. As another side, Alexander Hamilton was born on a Caribbean Island just to the east of the US Virgin Islands, at Charleston, Nevis Island. [There must be a nexus of nerve cells in my left temporal lobe that contains all this confusingly unrelated "screenshots." The mind is a very curious thing.]
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