Le singe est dans l’arbre. The state visit to France was cancelled in the wake of protests at the very idea - quelle horreur - that the French might have to work just a little bit longer to take advantage of some of the most generous pensions in the world.The King - who is still working at 74, and whose mother died in harness at 96 - went to Germany instead to see his cousins.
While town halls burned, the National Gallery opened its latest Francophile offering: After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. It celebrates Paris as the international centre of the artistic movement of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but also takes in the influence its artists exercised over their European contemporaries - and its later development into Cubism and Abstraction.
