At the Orangerie du Sénat--Paris

One of the best things about spending time in Paris is that if one is consumed by a vision of Hippolyte Flandrin’s Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer on a Wednesday afternoon one can go to the Louvre and see it for real before it closes for the night. Less than fifty meters from the Flandrin one can check out one of Géricault’s several small studies for his immense masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa done in his twenties. The studies that pre-figured the final painting are themselves masterpieces, emotionally charged and, in the case of the esquisse in oil and pen, hauntingly beautiful.

One of the best things about spending time in any city is to stumble, par hasard, into a contemporary art show and come out with images that blaze no less in the mind’s eye than those of Flandrin or Géricault.

He is here. He is twenty-two. In him you can see glimpses of the dazzling expressionism of Egon Schiele, the compassionate but unerring vision of Lucien Freud, and at times even the gentleness that makes Matisse’s harmonic colors akin to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. His name is Maxime Chanson and he sees with the vision of an old man, renders with the confidence of a master, and experiments with the liberty of a child. See him.