Impressionist's paintings and what they tell ~

The Muscarelle Museum at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia recently held an exhibition called "Seeing Colors: Secrets of the Impressionists." Since 1991, when my friend Nancy introduced me to the impressionist's art in Paris, I have continued to see enchantment in the beauty their oil paintings offer. When I walked into the museum two days ago, I wasn't disappointed. As I studied walls filled with the
oils by Monet, Pissaro, Cassatt and Sargent, both Americans and my favorite of all, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Enchanted by them and lingering beside several, it suddenly dawned on me that I was looking at life as it was in their time. Many were painted before the turn of the 1900 and others just afterward.

My brain recycled back to my current dilemma ~ wondering what life may have looked like in the early 1900s when our ancestors fled Spain for Hawaii and beyond to California. If the French impressionists painted life as it was then, maybe the Spanish painters had done the same thing. Could there have been a specific painter in that time period painting pastoral settings and the people in Spain just as Camille Pissarro did for the peasants in the villages and farms of France?

Today, I will begin my detective work through Spain's art and just maybe... I will be able to write the way it was in Manuela's Petals as if I was stepping back in time, their time. Wish me luck!