Map Card from Holland

Rene from Holland sent me this nice card from there.

Stormy Sea by Gustave Courbet

This card with a painting (oil on canvas) of a Stormy Sea by Gustave Courbet was sent to me by Andrea from Germany.

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work.

Courbet's paintings of the late 1840s and early 1850s brought him his first recognition. They challenged convention by depicting unidealized peasants and workers, often on a grand scale traditionally reserved for paintings of religious or historical subjects. Courbet's subsequent paintings were mostly of a less overtly political character: landscapes, seascapes, hunting scenes, nudes and still lifes. He was imprisoned for six months in 1871 for his involvement with the Paris Commune, and lived in exile in Switzerland from 1873 until his death.

I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: 'He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.' 

La Esmeralda

The painting on the card is of La Esmeralda. This card was sent to me by Katerina from Russia.

Esmeralda or La Esmeralda, born Agnes, is a fictional character in Victor Hugo's 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (or Notre Dame de Paris). She is a French Gypsy girl (near the end of the book, it is revealed that her biological mother was a French woman). She constantly attracts men with her seductive dances, and is rarely seen without her clever goat Djali. She is around 16 years old and has a kind and generous heart.

Card from Ukraine

Olga sent me this card from Ukraine. It is a painting by Kateryna Biletina.

The Nelson Mandela Bridge

The largest cable-stayed bridge in South Africa, the 284 metre long Nelson Mandela Bridge, starts virtually at the end of Jan Smuts Avenue and links Constitution Hill   precinct in Braamfontein   to the Cultural precinct in Newtown  , in the heart of the city’s inner city renewal project.

The Nelson Mandela Bridge, officially opened by Nelson Mandela himself, cost R38-million and took two years of construction to cross over the 40 railway lines that lie spread beneath its span.
The bridge carries two lanes of traffic; there are two sidewalks for pedestrians and a bicycle lane and it’s a ride worth taking for the incredible array of artworks decorating buildings past which the bridge runs (the city has some 65 artworks in total decorating its buildings).
Visually the bridge is incredibly appealing in its simplicity. Four tubular steel, concrete filled pylons are a central feature and key to the engineering of the bridge. The bridge is also supported on the largest pot bearings ever installed in the country, designed to cope with any stresses to the bridge - no surprise that Johannesburgs  Nelson Mandela Bridge was judged ‘the most outstanding civil engineering project achievement in the technical excellence category’ in 2003 by the SA Institute of Civil Engineers.

At night the bridge is a magical beacon that lights the sky, its imposing span dominating the horizon in amongst the city skyscrapers and viewed from the M1 highway by countless South Africans and visitors alike.

Thank you Christine (from Pretoria) for this nice card.