February 8, 2025

Ok, 10 more days until the next member of the family arrives.  Ember and I discussed names.  They have not decided on one, yet.

Ember found this coin that my great great grandfather won (his great great great grandfather) for a painting he submitted to a contest.   Ernest Bouche placed 3^rd “Class” in an exhibition hosted by the SocieteArtistique de l'Hérault(18868 – 1894),  Ember found the coin in my mother's desk, once my grandfather's desk.  He found a few other treasures, but he liked this one enough to create a broadside from it.   

 

I choose to share it tonight, because the story I've been trying to write in the past couple days centers around this desk.  When I was little the desk was in my grandparent's home.  The daughter in law of Ernest was Zizi, my great grandmother.  She died when I was 5 and she was 98.  Zizi left us kids each 1000 dollars in a savings bank account.  The passbooks for those accounts sat in a special compartment in that desk.  Occasionally, one of the adults would take them to the bank and have them updated with the interest making them grow.  The columns of numbers fascinated me.  We would each inherit our money when we turned 18.  Michael would have inherited his in 4 years, me not for 13.  At the time I thought that was such a rip off, but of course the opposite is true.  Many times, when I was alone in that room, I would sneak into that desk and look at my passbook as it accrued.  

The desk was a symbol of the past for me in a concrete manner.  I loved trolling through the draws and finding things in it.   In the bottom drawer there were photo albums of Zizi's of my grandmother as a child and a young woman.  Her life seemed so exotic to me and she was beautiful.  

In 1971 I finished high school and bought a FIAT 124 Special with that money.   The FIAT  is a prompt for other little stories for another day.  That car cost me 1600 dollars.  Thank you, Zizi, although it did not survive very long it did go across country and provided an entire household of teenagers with transportation for almost a year.    

But Ember's broadside illustrates the potential history that lies in so many boxes in this house.  I'm so glad he inherited the desk.  Not only is it handsome, not only does it have secret compartments, but it stores several stories to tell.  

As for Ernest Bouche, he was a court painter for the King of Belgium, and by all accounts a just and conscious man.   

This was a giant red tailed that sat high 

in a tree in town today.  I also saw an osprey at the rookery, but he was flying and the light was wrong to catch him in flight.  But I haven't seen an osprey up there in a few years.  I did not see any other big birds on my rookery ride. 

I don't think we had very many Ernest Bouche paintings in the house, we had several of his son, Henri's, and a few of his grandson, Louis's.  Painters made up a big part of our ancestry.

In 1966 my father was hospitalized and one of the things he did in the hospital was paint.  I still have a couple of the paintings he did that year, one of the Paris train station that hung in my room in Wilton for years.  

I know that my photography is influenced by all of the attention to painting there was throughout my childhood.  People exclaim that my photos look like paintings,  I see in paintings, I think.