The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough (2011)

The Paris theme continues. My audio bookstore owner suggested this for me and then I found out it was on NPR, best seller lists, etc. Non fiction is not as easy a read as a novel, but this was still gripping. I was listening to it and found I really, really wanted to reread some sections, so I went and bought the book. I was thrilled that the book responded to my need for images of the people and paintings described. I had already started looking some of them up on the Internet.

Historian McCullough looks at the Americans that went to Paris between 1830 and 1900, an earlier time  than I have been exploring, but still fascinating. This is a time after Ben Franklin and Jefferson, but Lafayette is still around and visited by various Americans. McCullough covers hundreds of people from all walks of life, but focuses the most on artists, writers and the "medicals." Only a few of the names were well known to me - P.T. Barnum (and Tom Thumb), Buffalo Bill, Mary Cassatt, James Fenimore Cooper. Thomas Edison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes,  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George Sand, John Singer Sargent, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the French impressionists - Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, etc. and some of the French writers. Many sounded vaguely familiar - like Samuel Morse, who is introduced as a painter, but was the Morse of the Morse code. Or Charles Sumner, who saw a black man amongst the medical students and had the great "aha" moment that intelligence was a matter of education, not race or genetics and  became one of the first abolitionists. And of course Eiffel, but i didn't realize that was a name of a man, or that he built the Eiffel Tower as a temporary structure for one of the Universal Expositions or that he planned the internal structure of the Statue of Liberty. There are others I never had heard of, e.g. artist George Healy, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens,  Elihu Washburne - the US embasador during the Franco-Prussian War and siege of Paris, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the fist woman doctor.

I learned a lot from this book and McCullough pulled things together for me. I didn't realize that many Americans came to Paris to study medicine, because we did not have adequate medical schools, with no opportunities to see real patients, etc. The Americans returned and founded schools, improved existing ones, and I thus learned one more piece of Harvard history. (Caleb's Crossing giving me a glimpse into very early Harvard history.)

I always like reading about artists and did not know that in those days they spent a lot of time copying masterpieces, so the Louvre was full of art students painting. I've never seen that in a museum, so do they not allow that anymore? Or is is just not artists learn today? Wonder what ever happened to those copies? Are they out on the market? What if one famous artist copied another in his early days? Are they labeled as such? Rembrandt's copy of daVinci, Picasso's copy of Rembrandt, etc. I also loved the fact that the Louvre was open to the general public. I had never heard that artists would sell admission to see one of their paintings. Always the struggle of artists to make ends meet.

An evolving topic of interest for me is World's Fairs or Universal Expositions, as they were called back then. They were obviously an important place for artists to show off their work, as I learned in this book and Clara and Mr. Tiffany. Countries showed off their progress, as in Paris Between the Wars, and as I learned when visiting the Lithuanian Archives in Putnam CT, where they still had pieces of the Lithuanian exhibit from 1939. Inventions were shown off. Some of the fairs had themes. It is a crazy phenomenon, when a whole vilalge is built for a short period of time and then torn down. It is a good thing the Eiffel Tower was so popular, they decided to keep it. I remember the New York Word's Fair in 1964/65 - only the Unisphere (a huge globe) and the observation towers are left standing. I guess they try to make money off of these fairs and attract a lot of visitors, but they are expensive to create and I know the New York fair lost money.

One overarching thought that I took away from this book is how important it is that people travel and exchange ideas. I know that we are so much more connected nowadays than they were then, but it makes a difference if you go to a different place and interact with people, get new ideas in a different environment, and then can bring them back home - or choose to stay. A friend of mine recently said he feels that Paris is his city. I don't know what city is mine, but I support study abroad and other traveling to find out.