Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva meets with Governor of the Bank of France François Villeroy de Galhau at the Banque de France.

 

IMF Photo/Cyril Marcilhacy

18 May 2021

Paris, France

Photo ref: CM_18052021-T17B4704.jpg

Deputy Managing Director Bo Li poses for a photo at the International Monetary Fund.

 

IMF Photo/Cory Hancock

23 August 2021

Washington, DC, United States

Photo ref: CH210823026.arw

 

managed to creep up behind him!!

Just managed to keep my feet dry !

 

A seriously "bracing" brisk walk on the beach (Sunday 26-02-06) during a high tide and pretty rough sea at Walcott on the North Norfolk Coast.

 

Luckily the sun popped out before it set to give a nice glow on the tops of the breaking waves.

 

Slightly cropped and rotated :-)

 

I'm curious to know if anyone thinks I could/should have cropped more sky out of this? edit - I'll leave it thanks to you all for your comments :-)

Managed to get my reflection in window of engine Spencer NC

I recently managed to find a brand new Contax G2 & 45mm f2, so of course I had to buy it some companion lenses

 

Instagram

Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva meets with Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison at the Australian Embassy in Washington D.C

 

IMF Photo/KIM HAUGHTON

May 13, 2015 - RUBAVU. World Bank Managing Director and COO Sri Mulyani Indrawati meets with two Rwandese and two Congolese women to listen to the challenges the small scale women cross border traders are facing. Rwanda. Photo: Simone D. McCourtie / World Bank

This picture, and the others like it were taken through a moving train window, so a certain amount of pot-luck was involved.

Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva participates in a panel for International Women's Day at the International Monetary Fund on March 3, 2020. IMF Photo/Cory Hancock

Yes, that is MY wrist.

Yes, it is real.

 

I noticed I hadn't put a picture up of my tattoo I got a couple months ago. Tim has one up for me on his photo stream.

 

If you are not aware of where this quote is from it's, HARRY POTTER!

 

I am a huge Harry Potter fan. Like many of the fans, this series has changed my life. It was the first book series I read all the way through till the end. It was the first book series I laughed and cried through.

 

This is my second tattoo. My first one I got when I was 18. It is a cross with angel wings on my lower back. Not your typical "tramp stamp", but I wanted to wear my faith somewhere that I was able to share when I wanted too, and cover up when I wanted too. I actually forget that its there most days.

 

I love my wrist tattoo. And if you look closely, I had the tattoo artist put a lightening bolt somewhere in the image, to pay tribute to Harry. :)

 

*I want to pay credit to my awesome tattoo artist from Blue Lotus Salon on Madison Westside. Dana was awesome and very helpful in planning this simple tattoo. She made me feel comfortable, and I am in love with this tattoo!

If you are in the Madison area and looking for a place to get a tattoo. They have two locations. My cousin recommended them, and now I am too!

Follow the website: www.tattoomadison.com/home.html#

Tiesto during the TIESTO-Kaleidoscope World Tour performance held at InterContinental Hotels Doha Beach Area in Doha, Qatar, 01 October 2010.

 

DJ TIESTO live performance at the stage of InterContinental Hotels Doha, Beach Area on October 01, 2010 Doha, Qatar.

Music fans of local and foreign nationalities welcomes back in an up-close-and-personal experience the ever smiling world famous DJ as he performs his best selling music in unison with his own extravagant and jaw-dropping giant LED screen, animated light works and powerful sound system.

TIESTO "Kaleidoscope World Tour" was a success full house brought-in Doha, organized and managed by Jared Mcculloch of Global DJs.

Hotel InterContinental Doha Beach Area is the premier concert venue in Doha.

(Photo and Text by ROMMEL T. BANGIT

 

Resolution in Mega pixels:

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Below text source from WIKIPEDIA:

TIESTO also known as DJ Tiësto, Allure, Da Joker, Drumfire, Handover Circuit, Paradise In Dubs, Passenger, Roze, Steve Forte Rio, Stray Dog, Tom Ace, Wild Bunch

Tiësto OON (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈcɛstoː]; born Tijs Michiel Verwest [ˈtɛi̯s miˈxil vərˈʋɛst] on January 17, 1969) is a Dutch musician, DJ and record producer of electronic dance music. Although he has used many aliases in the past, he is best known for his work as DJ Tiësto. On his latest productions, however, he has dropped the "DJ" label and is now known simply as "Tiësto", an alias which is a twist of his childhood nickname.

 

In 1997, he founded the label Black Hole Recordings with Arny Bink, where he released the Magik and In Search of Sunrise CD series. In 1999 and 2000 he collaborated with Ferry Corsten to create Gouryella. His 2000 remix of Delerium's "Silence" featuring Sarah McLachlan exposed him to more mainstream audiences. In 2001 he released his first solo album In My Memory which gave him several major hits that launched his career. He was named "World’s No.1 DJ" 3 consecutive times by DJ Magazine from 2002 through 2004.

Just after releasing his second studio album Just Be in 2004 at the Summer Olympics, he performed live at the opening ceremony in Athens, Greece, becoming the first DJ to play live on stage at an Olympics. Tracks he made especially for the Olympics were mixed together and released as the mix compilation Parade of the Athletes later that year. In April 2007 Tiësto launched both his radio show Tiësto's Club Life on Radio 538 in the Netherlands and released his third studio album titled Elements of Life. The album reached number one on the Dutch album chart as well on "Billboard Top Electronic Albums" in the U.S. and received a nomination for a Grammy Award in 2008. Tiësto released his fourth studio album called Kaleidoscope in October 2009.

Early Life and Career

Tijs Michiel Verwest was born in Breda, North Brabant, Netherlands on January 17, 1969. He had an interest in music since the age of twelve. When he was fourteen he decided to dedicate more time to it and began DJing professionally at school parties. He then moved on to become a resident DJ between 1985 and 1994 at several clubs in the Netherlands after his manager and friend Wilfred encouraged him. However, it was at The Spock, a small club in Breda, where he was able to fine-tune his own style by playing in a separate room from 10 p.m. until 4 a.m. on weekends. In the beginning of his career, as a DJ he played mostly New Beat and acid house.

In 1994, he began releasing material on Noculan Records' sub-labels Chemo and Coolman. During these years, he produced hardcore/gabber tracks under aliases such as Da Joker and DJ Limited. He was later discovered by the general manager of Rotterdam-based Basic Beat Recordings. In late 1994, he signed to Basic Beat where he met Arny Bink, Tiësto released records on the sub-label Trashcan, founded by Arny, and later created the Guardian Angel sub-label with Arny in which they introduced the popular Forbidden Paradise series. Meanwhile from 1995 to 1996 he released four extended plays on Bonzai Jumps and XTC, sub-labels of Lightning Records. In 1997, Tiësto joined his friend Yves Vandichel on his sub-label, DJ Yves, a division of the now defunct Human Resource label XSV Music. In the fall of 1997, both Arny and Tiësto decided to leave Basic Beat and create their own parent label, now known as Black Hole Recordings, Trashcan was discontinued and Guardian Angel continued releasing music until 2002. Through Black Hole, Tiësto released the Magik series and also created two major sub-labels in 1998; In Trance We Trust and SongBird.

 

From 1998 to 1999, Tiësto released music on Planetary Consciousness were he met A&R Hardy Heller and invited him to release some records on Black Hole. Tiësto later included the In Search of Sunrise series on SongBird. In 1999, Tiësto joined forces with fellow Dutch deejay Ferry Corsten to create the trance based duo of Gouryella. He also collaborated with Benno de Goeij from 1998 to 2000 under the name Kamaya Painters. Since November 1999 he performed monthly as a resident at Gatecrasher in Sheffield, one of the most popular clubs in England. In 1999 he also played in a 12-hour set, being his longest lasting concert in Amsterdam.

Late in 2000, Tiësto decided to concentrate on his personal work and left Corsten by himself to write and produce Gouryella's next single with John Ewbank, the record company was demanding more tracks and neither Tiësto or Ferry could work together at the time. Tiësto introduced Armin van Buuren, Johan Gielen and Ferry Corsten to the mainstream with his first compilations and the In Trance We Trust series. Summerbreeze became Tiësto's debut DJ mix album in the US with the help of a contract signed to Nettwerk. Summerbreeze featured his remix of Delerium's "Silence", it spent four weeks in the UK's Top Ten chart, it reached number three in the Billboard dance chart. In Search of Sunrise 2 was released in 2000. Tiësto decided to create a sub-label, known as Magik Muzik. The label began releasing Tiësto’s own releases, but it has also released tracks for the Filterheadz, Oliver Lieb, Mark Norman, Mojado, Phynn and Jes Brieden. The label became a trademark which stands for high quality electronic dance music which was due to the release of Tiësto's classic dance anthem "Flight 643" in 2001.

In My Memory era (2001–2004)

Tiësto's fame started to rise in the early 2000s after his set at the first ID&T Innercity party (Live at Innercity: Amsterdam RAI), and the release of In My Memory, his first solo album released in 2001 which contained 10 singles and 5 major hits; The singles from the album were: "Lethal Industry" which was actually produced in 1999 and had only 3 copies released at that time, the track was officially released in 2001 which was remixed by Richard Durand in 2006 along with "Flight 643" which was another leading single that was later adapted with vocals by Suzanne Palmer and released as "643 (Love's on Fire)". Other tracks were "Obsession" in which Tiësto worked alongside Junkie XL, the instrumental tracks "Dallas 4PM" and "Suburban Train" with "Urban Train" as its B-Side which contained some vocals. The last singles to be released were "In My Memory" which is the title track for the album as it only received high ratings in the United States and the opening track "Magik Journey" which opened Tiësto in Concert (2003). On February 2, 2002 Tiësto played nine consecutive hours during the second edition of the Dutch Dimension festival. On February 27 he was awarded a Zilveren ('Silver') Harp music award. The same year he also received a Lucky Strike Dance Award in the category Best DJ Trance/Progressive. In August he became part of Moby's Area2 Tour. For eighteen days he travelled through the United States with artists such as Moby himself, but also David Bowie and Busta Rhymes. In January 2003 Tiësto received the annual Dutch Popprijs ('Pop Award') during the Noorderslag festival. After touring with Moby, Tiësto remixed two songs from him, "We Are All Made of Stars" and "Extreme Ways" in the same year, having "We Are All Made of Stars" reach #13 in the Hot Dance Club Play. In 2002 he released his first In Search of Sunrise mix to feature a place on its name, In Search of Sunrise 3: Panama. On March 28, 2003; Tiësto, Dieselboy, Bad Boy Bill, and Noel Sanger joined the PlayStation2 Dual Play tour. Tiësto and Noel's appearance began on April 13 and ended on June 6.

His fame continued to skyrocket in the early 2000s, following his six-hour "Tiësto Solo" sets which he performed without other DJs or opening acts. This idea, of one DJ playing alone to a large crowd, was brought to its pinnacle when Tiësto was the first DJ to hold a solo concert in a stadium; on May 10, 2003, he performed for over 25,000 people in Arnhem's GelreDome. This concert was later called Tiësto in Concert, the event was an enormous success. He repeated the same type of concert the following year during two consecutive nights in late October. In addition to holding these two concerts for 35,000 of his fans, he held another concert for a crowd of 20,000 in Hasselt, Belgium the following week. DVDs of both his May 10, 2003 and October 30, 2004 concerts have been released, having the other DVD titled Tiësto in Concert 2. The DVD's show the journey from the first idea to the main event, it features live performances by Andain, Dinand Woesthoff, and Jan Johnston. The event includes live music and dancers performing at different times throughout the set. The theme of the event is a mystical, musical journey around the world based on the theme of Magik. It consists of 200+ minutes of performances with a second disc with special features, It includes a behind-the-scenes looking at The Making Of the event, the music video for his song "Traffic" and TV Commercials for the event. The second DVD has performances from Aqualung and violin player DJ Mason, Micha Klein and the Bulgarian Children of Orpheus choir. During this period, he was crowned as "No. 1. DJ in the World" by DJ Magazine (UK) in 2002, 2003, and 2004.

Just Be era (2004–2007)

In 2004, he released his second artist album Just Be, which featured his first single "Traffic" which is the first non-vocal track to reach number one spot in the Dutch national charts for 23 years. The track "Sweet Misery" was originally written for Evanescence but it did not meet the deadline for the release of their album. In support to his Just Be album, he played at Breda, Eindhoven, Utrecht, and Amsterdam; these stops were later named Just Be: Train Tour. On May 20, 2004 he was appointed Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau by Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

The Athens Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (ATHOC) asked Tiësto to perform at the Olympic Games, making him the first DJ to play live on stage at an Olympic Games at the 2004 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Athens, where he played for 90 minutes. Tiësto flew to Athens in January 2004 to have a meeting with the ATHOC. His Tiësto in Concert DVD caught their attention, after which he was asked to write more tracks based on his opening tune "Adagio for Strings" which could fit in with the Olympic spirit and combine the classical with the modern age; They also requested that he play his own produced music. The first rehearsal was on Saturday August, 7, for an empty stadium; the second rehearsal was on Sunday August 8 with 35,000 volunteers, a lot of the people recognised some tracks like "Traffic" and "Adagio for Strings". The last rehearsal included almost 60,000 people in the stadium which was on Tuesday August 10, there were some technical problems, the mixer broke down, the monitors dropped out a couple of times and the music in the stadium was not continuously on the right volume.

During the parade on Friday, August 13, 2004, all participating nations introduced their athletes—10,500 in total There were 80,000 spectators, only 75,000 knowing about dance music. During the course of his performance the Dutch athletes started dancing in front of the DJ booth and had to be moved on by officials. The performance included new tracks produced especially for the Opening Ceremony and songs that were created to complement the spirit and theme of the ceremony. A condensed studio-recorded album of the songs played on the Olympic set was later released, including new songs specially composed for the occasion, entitled Parade of the Athletes in October 2004. In the liner notes, he noted the IOC requested that the music not contain any lyrics as they could be inadvertently misinterpreted.

In late 2004, he began his touring across Latin America, with his release of In Search of Sunrise 3: Panama in which he gained influence from the sun and sand in summer 2002. The tour continued in 2005, and Tiësto performed live at Brazil, Argentina, Panama, Peru, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador and Colombia. Following the tours, In Search of Sunrise 4: Latin America was released in 2005, featuring a second CD for the first time in the In Search of Sunrise series.

In 2005, his Perfect Remixes Vol. 3 compilation was released through Warlock Records, containing ten tracks which were created during the beginning of his career, between those is Junkie XL, Mauro Picotto and The Roc Project. On August 20, 2005, Verwest took Tiësto in Concert to the US when he played to 16,000 at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena with Cirque du Soleil dancers. For the second year in a row he performed live at a New Year's Eve/New Year's concert in Las Vegas, Nevada at the Orleans Arena to a sell-out crowd. Despite his four-city US tour being postponed due to the hurricane damage in New Orleans and Miami, playing such cities further expanded and cemented his popularity among mainstream audiences. This was surpassed later in summer 2007 when some 250,000 danced on Ipanema Beach, Brazil, becoming the second largest concert in history. BPM magazine has an annual poll in the US which is unveiled in the WMC, in 2005 Tiësto took the No. 1 spot. The influences of Los Angeles remained with him and would later influence his In Search of Sunrise compilation.

A wax sculpture of Tiësto was placed behind a turntable at Madame Tussauds in Amsterdam where visitors can mix Tiësto's music together. In the fall of 2005 he went on a very successful tour across Central and Eastern Europe where he played once in each country to crowds of 10,000 to 15,000 fans. Stops were made in Ukraine, Slovakia, Serbia, Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Croatia, Poland and South Africa. The United States tour that was part of Tiësto in Concert was dwarfed by his appearance at Sensation White in 2006 where he performed to over 45,000 people in the world's biggest dance event in Amsterdam, Holland.

In Search of Sunrise 5: Los Angeles was released in 2006 which was certified Gold in Canada for sales over 50,000 copies. It also charted, peaking #34 in Canada and #59 in Austria. The compilation was launched in the Winter Music Conference at Mansion in South Beach Miami to support his release, Tiësto went on his In Search of Sunrise 5 Asia Tour for more than 3 weeks.

In September 2006, Tiësto was admitted to hospital after experiencing pain in his chest. He was diagnosed with pericarditis and subsequently had to cancel a number of shows. With the diagnosis, he was invited to support Dance4Life to help teens who are not aware of the risks of HIV/AIDS. He was chosen as the official ambassador for the Dance4Life foundation in May 2006, and released the song "Dance4Life" with Maxi Jazz to help spread the awareness of HIV/AIDS.

On April 6, 2007 Tiësto began presenting a new weekly two-hour radio show called Tiësto's Club Life on Dutch radio station Radio 538. It is syndicated worldwide and later released as a Podcast.

Elements of Life era (2007-2009)

On April 16, 2007, Tiësto released his third studio album Elements of Life, the album moved 73,000 units in its April release, according to Nielsen SoundScan. During the production of the album Tiësto in several cases sent a demo with the music to certain artists, and they replied back with the lyrics and vocals and other duration times. In the case of Christian Burns from BBMak, Tiësto met him through MySpace and got in contact with him and the production of the single "In the Dark". The album consists of rock, trance and experimental music, which shows the style Tiësto has grown throughout the years since his previous albums which contained lyrics, In My Memory and Just Be. Producer Brian Transeau collaborated with Tiësto in three tracks, he composed "Bright Morningstar" and "Sweet Things", he also performed the vocals in the single "Break My Fall". Together, they produced more tracks which were not released in the album, Tiësto has mentioned they would work again during the coming summer. In December 2007 it was announced that the album was nominated for a Grammy Award, in the category "Best Electronic/Dance Album." The album also received gold certifications in Belgium, Hungary, Netherlands, and Romania.[28] A special release party was held at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam on November 3, 2007 for In Search of Sunrise 6: Ibiza.

His last three full-length releases broke the 70,000 mark, and the 2003 2CD compilation Nyana recently hit 87,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan. In support of the album, he embarked on his Elements of Life World Tour which had shows across the world. Tiësto's performance at Parken Stadium in Copenhagen, Denmark on November 10, 2007 was also sold out.[30] The Copenhagen: Elements of Life World Tour DVD was released in a party which was held on February 29, 2008 in London at the IndigO2 club.

Tiësto announced his residence at Privilege, officially recognised by the Guinness World Records as being the largest club in the world. He played in Ibiza every Monday, from July 7 until September 22. The gigs consisted of sets in the style of his In Search of Sunrise series. In 2007, he had released In Search of Sunrise 6: Ibiza which was inspired by the island. The residencies also featured the performance of guest deejays, all selected by Tiësto, such as Chris Lake, Andy Duguid, Mat Zo, Cosmic Gate, Alex Kunnari and Sander van Doorn as well as exclusive appearances by Fonzerelli and Airbase.

On April 28, Tiësto released Elements of Life: Remixed, a recompilation of the Elements of Life album with all songs being replaced by remixed versions. In mid-2008, Tiësto announced his In Search of Sunrise: Summer Tour 2008, which will be presented by Armani Exchange on May in support of his upcoming In Search of Sunrise 7: Asia compilation[34] and the previously released In Search of Sunrise 6: Ibiza. On August 8, 2008 Tiësto became the first DJ to perform at the famous O2 Arena in London as part of his In Search of Sunrise 7 summer tour, the event was sold out with a capacity of 20,000 people. Earlier that day, Tiësto had performed in-store at Armani Exchange on Regent Street in central London.

A sole production was prepared for Tiësto from June 8 to September 21 for his return at club Privilege for the second year in a row on Monday nights, after a successful year as a resident in 2008. During his time at Privilege he previewed tracks from his upcoming artist album. InTheBooth, the official members-only fansite of Tiësto launched July 17, 2009. On July 31, he was the first DJ to perform for 25,000 people at an exclusive outdoor concert in Victoria Park, London.

Kaleidoscope era (2009–present)

On October 6, 2009, Tiësto released his fourth studio album Kaleidoscope, which featured artists such as Priscilla Ahn, Calvin Harris, Tegan & Sara and Nelly Furtado. Unlike his earlier albums, which were all mostly trance, Kaleidoscope explores other electronic genres, and is considered Tiesto's most experimental album. The first single "I Will Be Here" featuring Sneaky Sound System being released in July 2009.[37][38][39] In its first week, the album reached the Top 10 chart on iTunes.

To release the album he has set up a new record label called Musical Freedom after parting ways with Black Hole Recordings. Tiësto felt that his music was evolving in a new direction and his focus as an artist was moving away from what Black Hole was set up to support. His new tour, sharing the name of his new album, called Kaleidoscope World Tour commenced in late September.

Tiësto contributed songs to both DJ Hero and DJ Hero 2 video games and is a playable character in the second game. He contributed two exclusive mixes to the second game, and used content from DJ Hero 2 to create the official video for his single 'Speed Rail' - the world's first music video to be created entirely using in-game footage.

Tiësto has produced a trance-flavoured song on Memphis rap duo Three 6 Mafia's upcoming album Laws of Power called "Feel It," which features Flo Rida and Sean Kingston.

On March 16, 2010, Tiësto released his greatest hits album called Magikal Journey: The Hits Collection 1998-2008, a two disc album focusing on his most famous songs and remixes of his songs.

On April 7, 2010, Tiësto announced that he would start a new compilation series called A New Dawn with his own label Musical Freedom. In his interview Tiësto furthermore confirmed that he will no longer have any more involvement with Black Hole Recordings.

On August 31, 2010 Kaleidoscope: Remixed was released, a remix album of his album Kaleidoscope.

On December 11, 2010, Tiësto was one of the headlining acts at ZoukOut 2010,[48] which was held in Singapore at Siloso Beach, Sentosa Island.

Philanthropy

On January 6, 2005, Tiësto performed in an outdoor fundraiser in De Dam, Amsterdam. The event was free, and many famous Dutch artists like Dinand Woesthoff, BLØF, Acda & De Munnik, Di-rect, Berget Lewis, Xander de Buisonjé and Trijntje Oosterhuis were involved in it to provide financial aid to the people who suffered from the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in Southern and Southeastern Asia. All profits made of all TV commercials and live broadcast were given to the organisations collecting the relief funds.

In April 2006, Tiësto was named the official worldwide ambassador for the Dance4Life foundation promoting awareness of HIV/AIDS, as the foundation's ambassador he has helped the organisation with fundraising along with recording the track "Dance4life" that he recorded with Maxi Jazz from Faithless. The foundation consists on a better way of living with safe sex in exchange of entertainment to the young crowd.[50] The song was a huge success, peaking for five weeks in #3 and eleven consecutive weeks in the Top 10 of the Dutch Singles Chart, it also reached #5 in Belgium, #6 in Finland and also charting in the UK and Germany. With the successful release of Elements of Life, Tiësto and fashion designer Giorgio Armani collaborated together on a limited edition Tiësto T-shirt available at Armani Exchange stores. His single "Sweet Things" comes with the shirt including an exclusive "A|X Remix" by Tom Cloud which shows the great influence Tiësto has in fashion culture.[51] The charity raised over US$300,000.[34] On November 29, 2008 artists like Tiësto himself, Sied van Riel, Leon Bolier, Joop, and MC Gunner presented a concert at The Sand, Amsterdam promoted by Dance4Life, the sales from the event will go to the foundation to support next year's Schools4Life project.

Personal life

Until early 2006, Tiësto was in a relationship with Dutch model Monique Spronk. On January 10, 2008, Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf announced that Tiësto and his girlfriend Stacey Blokzijl were going to get married on October 10, 2008 in Cartagena, Colombia. He proposed to her in December 2007 while they were visiting Mauritius. Tiësto cancelled his wedding for October 10, because he claimed to have a busy schedule and too little time for the preparations. During Christmas 2008, Blokzijl broke off the engagement due to the constant delays to their wedding.

Source: Wikipedia

 

TIESTO, hotel intercontinental hotels and resorts, kaleidoscope,Hotel "InterContinental Hotels and Resorts Doha" Kaleidoscope TIESTO rommelbangit rommelbangit@yahoo.com "electronic dance music" "global DJ" "Nikon D300" trance clubbing dancing lights music musician nightlife party progreesive remix strobe "Top 100 DJ's" "doha qatar" "club culture" "trance sounds" pioneer "US Dance Chart" "Radio 538" "Trance DJ Netherlands" "Digital Spy" "DJ Mag" "DJ Magazine" "Music News" MixMag "Trance Artist" "Progressive Trance" electronic electronix

Backwards in, and slow turn over the bow.

yea, I ams still Rolypoly pilot!

 

Visit this location at Hook of Holland in Second Life

Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and the IMF delegation during breaks between meetings and bilaterals.

 

IMF Photo/Kim Haughton

21 September 2022

New York, New York, United States

Photo ref: KH220921069.jpg

Managed by the West Bengal State Government at this time

 

Scanned from a half frame Kodachrome slide

The Lost World (20th Century Fox, 1960).

youtu.be/h1CLA-gJbmA?t=5s Trailer

Irwin Allen, the producer who would go on to make the disaster film a huge success in the seventies, brought us this Saturday afternoon fodder with giant lizards posing as dinosaurs. Starring Michael Rennie, David Hedison, Claude Rains and Jill St. John.

Intended as a grand sci-fi/fantasy epic remake of Arthur Conan Doyle's classic novel. The first film adaptation, shot in 1925, was a milestone in many ways, but movie making and special effects had come a long way in 35 years. Irwin Allen's Lost World (LW) & 20th Century Fox version was derailed on the way to greatness, but managed to still be a respectable, (if more modest) A-film. Allen's screenplay followed the book fairly well, telling of Professor Challenger's expedition to a remote plateau in the Amazon upon which dinosaurs still lived. Aside from the paleontological presumptions in the premise, there is little "science" in The Lost World. Nonetheless, dinosaur movies have traditionally been lumped into the sci-fi genre.

Synopsis

When his plane lands in London, crusty old professor George Edward Challenger is besieged by reporters questioning him about his latest expedition to the headwaters of the Amazon River. After the irascible Challenger strikes reporter Ed Malone on the head with his umbrella, Jennifer Holmes, the daughter of Ed's employer, Stuart Holmes, offers the injured reporter a ride into town. That evening, Jenny is escorted by Lord John Roxton, an adventurer and big game hunter, to Challenger's lecture at the Zoological Institute, and Ed invites them to sit with him. When Challenger claims to have seen live dinosaurs, his colleague Professor Summerlee scoffs and asks for evidence. Explaining that his photographs of the creatures were lost when his boat overturned, Challenger invites Summerlee to accompany him on a new expedition to the "lost world," and asks for volunteers. When Roxton raises his hand, Jenny insists on going with him, but she is rejected by Challenger because she is a woman. Ed is given a spot after Holmes offers to fund the expedition if the reporter is included. The four then fly to the Amazon, where they are met by Costa, their guide and Manuel Gomez, their helicopter pilot. Arriving unexpectedly, Jenny and her younger brother David insist on joining them. Unable to arrange transportation back to the United States, Challenger reluctantly agrees to take them along. The next day, they take off for the lost world and land on an isolated plateau inhabited by dinosaurs. That evening, a dinosaur stomps out of the jungle, sending them scurrying for cover. After the beast destroys the helicopter and radio, the group ventures inland. When one of the creatures bellows threateningly, they flee, and in their haste, Challenger and Ed slip and tumble down a hillside, where they encounter a native girl. The girl runs into the jungle, but Ed follows and captures her. They then all take refuge in a cave, where Roxton, who has been making disparaging remarks about Jenny's desire to marry him solely for his title, angers Ed. Ed lunges at Roxton, pushing him to the ground, where he finds a diary written by Burton White, an adventurer who hired Roxton three years earlier to lead him to the lost diamonds of Eldorado. Roxton then admits that he never met White and his party because he was delayed by a dalliance with a woman, thus abandoning them to certain death. Gomez angrily snaps that his good friend Santiago perished in the expedition. That night, Costa tries to molest the native girl, and David comes to her rescue and begins to communicate with her through sign language. After Gomez goes to investigate some movement he spotted in the vegetation, he calls for help, and when Roxton runs out of the cave, a gunshot from an unseen assailant is fired, nearly wounding Roxton and sending the girl scurrying into the jungle. Soon after, Ed and Jenny stray from camp and are pursued by a dinosaur, and after taking refuge on some cliffs, watch in horror as their stalker becomes locked in combat with another prehistoric creature and tumbles over the cliffs into the waters below. Upon returning to camp, they discover it deserted, their belongings in disarray. As David stumbles out from some rocks to report they were attacked by a tribe of natives, the cannibals return and imprison them in a cave with the others. As the drums beat relentlessly, signaling their deaths, the native girl reappears and motions for them to follow her through a secret passageway that leads to the cave in which Burton White lives, completely sightless. After confirming that all in his expedition perished, White tells them of a volcanic passageway that will lead them off the plateau, but warns that they must first pass through the cave of fire. Cautioning them that the natives plan to sacrifice them, White declares that their only chance of survival is to slip through the cave and then seal it with a boulder. After giving them directions to the cave, White asks them to take the girl along. As the earth, on the verge of a volcanic eruption, quakes, they set off through the Graveyard of the Damned, a vast cavern littered with dinosaur skeletons, the victims of the deadly sulfurous gases below. Pursued by the ferocious natives, Roxton takes the lead as they inch their way across a narrow ledge above the molten lava. After escaping the natives, they jam the cave shut with a boulder and, passing a dam of molten lava, finally reach the escape passage. At its mouth is a pile of giant diamonds and a dinosaur egg. As Costa heaps the diamonds into his hat, Challenger fondles the egg and Gomez pulls a gun and announces that Roxton must die in exchange for the death of Santiago, Gomez' brother. Acting quickly, Ed hurls the diamonds at Gomez, throwing him off balance and discharging his gun. The gunshot awakens a creature slumbering in the roiling waters below. After the beast snatches Costa and eats him alive, Ed tries to dislodge the dam, sending a few scorching rocks tumbling down onto the monster. Feeling responsible for the peril of the group, Gomez sacrifices his life by using his body as a lever to dislodge the dam, covering the creature with oozing lava. As the cave begins to crumble from the impending eruption, the group hurries to safety. Just then, the volcano explodes, destroying the lost world. After Roxton hands Ed a handful of diamonds he has saved as a wedding gift for him and Jenny, Challenger proudly displays his egg, which then hatches, revealing a baby dinosaur. The End.

The 50s had seen several examples of the dinosaur sub-genre. LW is one of the more lavish ones, owing to color by DeLuxe and CinemaScope. The A-level actors help too. Claude Rains plays the flamboyant Challenger. Michael Rennie plays Roxton, perhaps a bit too cooly. Jill St. John and Vitina Marcus do well as the customary eye candy. David Hedison as Malone and Fernando Lamas as Gomez round out the bill.

The first film version of LW was a silent movie shot in 1925: screenplay by Marion Fairfax. The film featured stop-motion animated dinosaurs by a young Willis O'Brien. Fairfax followed Doyle's text, but Fairfax added a young woman to the team, Paula White. Ostensibly trying to find her father from the first failed expedition, she provided the love triangle interest between Malone and Roxton.

Allen's screenplay tried to stick to Doyle's text as much as Hollywood would allow. It carried on Fairfax's invention of the young woman member of the group as triangle fodder. Fairfax had Doyle's ape men (ape man) but omitted the native humans. Allen had the natives, but no ape men. Allen revived the Gomez/revenge subplot, which Fairfax skipped. Doyle's story had Challenger bringing back a pterodactyl. Fairfax made it a brontosaur who rampaged through London streets (spawning a popular trope). Allen suggested the baby dinosaur traveling to London.

Willis O'Brien pitched 20th Century Fox in the late 50s, to do a quality remake of LW. He had gained much experience in the intervening 35 years, so his stop-motion dinosaurs were to be the real stars. Fox bass liked the idea, but by the time the ball started rolling, there was trouble in studioland. Fox's grand epic Cleopatra was underway, but was already 5 million dollars over budget. Cleo would nearly sink 20th Century Fox when it was finally released in 1963. To stay afloat, all other Fox films' budgets were slashed. Allen could no longer afford the grand O'Brien stop-motion.

Allen's production is often criticized for its "cheap" dinosaurs, which were live monitor lizards and alligators with fins and plates and horns glue onto them. (more on that below) These were already a bit cheesy when used in the 1940 film One Million B.C.. O'Brien is still listed on the credits as "Effects Technician," but all Allen could afford was lizards with glued on extras. Somewhat amusingly, the script still refers to them as brontosaurs and T-Rexes.

The character of Jennifer Holmes starts out promising. She's a self-assured to the edges of pushy, and is said to be able to out shoot and out ride any man. Yet, when she gets to the Amazon jungle, she's little more than Jungle Barbie, dressed in girlie clothes and screaming frequently. She even does the typical Hollywood trip-and-fall when chased by the dinosaur, so that a man must save her.

Bottom line? FW is a finer example of the not-quite-sci-fi dinosaur sub-genre. The actors are top drawer, even if some of their acting is a bit flat. Nonetheless, FW is a fair adaptation of Doyle's

classic adventure novel, given the constraints of Hollywood culture.

 

The Movie Club Annals … Review

The Lost World 1960

Introduction

There was absolutely nothing wrong with Irwin Allen's 1960 production of The Lost World. Nothing. It was perfect in every way. I therefore find myself in the unique and unfamiliar position of having to write a rave review about a Movie Club movie that was entirely devoid of flaws.

Faced with such a confounding task, I half-heartedly considered faking a bad review, then praying my obvious deceptions would go unnoticed. But the patent transparency of my scheme convinced me to abandon it posthaste. After all, leveling concocted criticisms at such an unassailable masterpiece would be a futile and tiresome exercise, the pretense of which would escape nary a semi-cognizant soul.

Thus, having retreated from my would-be descent into literary intrigue, I start this review in earnest by borrowing a quote from the legendary Shelly Winters, spoken during the 1972 filming of Irwin Allen's The Poseidon Adventure:

"I'm ready for my close up now, Mr. Allen.” Shelly Winters, 1972

Review

A bit of research into the casting choices of Irwin Allen, who wrote, produced, and directed The Lost World, begins to reveal the genius behind the virtuosity.

The first accolades go to Irwin for his casting of Vitina Marcus, the immaculately groomed Saks 5th Avenue cave girl with exquisite taste in makeup, jewelry, and cave-wear. No finer cave girl ever graced a feature film.

Vitina Marcus, as The Cave Girl

She was the picture of prehistoric glamour, gliding across the silver screen in her designer bearskin mini-pelt, her flawless coiffure showing no signs of muss from the traditional courting rituals of the day, her perfect teeth the envy of even the most prototypical Osmond. Even her nouveau-opposable thumbs retained their manicure, in spite of the oft-disagreeable duties that frequently befell her as an effete member of the tribal gentry.

By no means just another Neanderthal harlot, Vitina had a wealth of talent to augment her exterior virtues. Her virtuoso interpretation of a comely cave girl in The Lost World certainly didn't escape the attention Irwin Allen. In fact, he was so taken with her performance that he later engaged her services again, casting her as the Native Girl in episode 2.26 of his Voyage to The Bottom of The Sea TV series.

Leery of potential typecasting, Vitina went on to obtain roles with greater depth and more sophisticated dialogue. This is evidenced by the great departure she took from her previous roles when she next portrayed the part of Sarit, a female barbarian, in episode 1.24 of Irwin Allen's The Time Tunnel TV series.

Vitina, as Sarit

Vitina's efforts to avoid typecasting paid off in spades, as she was soon rewarded with the distinctive role of Girl, a female Tarzanesque she-beast character, in episode 3.14 of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV series.

Lured back from the U.N.C.L.E. set by Irwin Allen, Vitina was next cast in the role of Athena (a.k.a. Lorelei), the green space girl with the inverted lucite salad bowl hat, in episodes 2.2 and 2.16 of the revered Lost in Space TV series.

And with this, Vitina reached the pinnacle of her career. For her many unparalleled displays of thespian pageantry, she leaves us forever in her debt as she exits the stage.

For those who would still question the genius of Irwin Allen, I defy you to find a better casting choice for the character of Lord John Roxton than that of Michael Rennie. Mr. Rennie, who earlier starred as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still, went on to even greater heights, starring as The Keeper in episodes 1.16 and 1.17 of the revered Lost in Space TV series. Throughout his distinguished career, Mr. Rennie often played highly cerebral characters with

unique names, such as Garth A7, Tribolet, Hasani, Rama Kahn, Hertz, and Dirk. How befitting that his most prolific roles came to him through a man named Irwin, a highly cerebral character with a unique name.

The selection of David Hedison to play Ed Malone was yet another example of Irwin's uncanny foresight. Soon after casting him in The Lost World, Irwin paved Mr. Hedison's path to immortality by casting him as a lead character in his Voyage to The Bottom of The Sea TV series. Although Voyage ended in 1968, Mr. Hedison departed the show with a solid resume and a bright future.

In the decades following Voyage, Mr. Hedison has been a veritable fixture on the small screen, appearing in such socially influential programs as The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Knight Rider, The Fall Guy and The A Team. Mr. Hedison's early collaborations with Irwin Allen have left him never wanting for a day's work in Hollywood, a boon to the legions of discerning fans who continue to savor his inspiring prime time depictions.

Irwin selected Fernando Lamas to play Manuel Gomez, the honorable and tortured soul of The Lost World who needlessly sacrificed himself at the end of the movie to save all the others. To get a feel for how important a casting decision he was to Irwin, just look at the pertinent experience Mr. Lamas brought to the table:

Irwin knew that such credentials could cause him to lose the services of Mr. Lamas to another project, and he took great pains to woo him onto the set of The Lost World. And even though Mr. Lamas never appeared in the revered Lost in Space TV series, his talent is not lost on us.

Jay Novello was selected by Irwin Allen to play Costa, the consummate Cuban coward who perpetually betrays everyone around him in the name of greed. In pursuing his craven calling, Mr. Novello went on to play Xandros, the Greek Slave in Atlantis, The Lost Continent, as well as countless other roles as a coward.

Although Mr. Novella never appeared in the revered Lost in Space TV series, his already long and distinguished career as a coward made him the obvious choice for Irwin when the need for an experienced malingerer arose.

Jill St. John was Irwin's pick to play Jennifer Holmes, the "other" glamour girl in The Lost World. Not to be upstaged by glamour-cave-girl Vitina Marcus, Jill played the trump card and broke out the pink go-go boots and skin-tight Capri pants, the perfect Amazonian summertime jungle wear.

Complete with a perfect hairdo, a killer wardrobe, a little yip-yip dog named Frosty, and all the other trappings of a wealthy and pampered prehistoric society, Jill's sensational allure rivaled even that of a certain cave girl appearing in the same film.

With the atmosphere rife for an on-set rivalry between Jill and Vitina, Irwin still managed to keep the peace, proving that he was as skilled a diplomat as he was a director.

Claude Rains, as Professor George Edward Challenger

And our cup runneth over, as Irwin cast Claude Rains to portray Professor George Edward Challenger. His eminence, Mr. Rains is an entity of such immeasurable virtue that he is not in need of monotonous praise from the likes of me.

I respectfully acknowledge the appearance of Mr. Rains because failure to do so would be an unforgivable travesty. But I say nothing more on the subject, lest I state something so obvious and uninspiring as to insult the intelligence of enlightened reader.

Irwin's casting of the cavemen mustn't be overlooked, for their infallibly realistic portrayals are unmatched within the Pleistocene Epoch genre of film. Such meticulous attention to detail is what separates Irwin Allen from lesser filmmakers, whose pale imitations of his work only further to underscore the point.

To be sure, it is possible to come away with the unfounded suspicion that the cavemen are really just a bunch of old white guys from the bar at the local Elks lodge. But Irwin was an absolute stickler for authenticity, and would never have allowed the use of such tawdry measures to taint his prehistoric magnum opus.

In truth, Irwin's on-screen cavemen were borne of many grueling years of anthropological research, so the explanation for their somewhat modern, pseudo-caucasian appearance lies obviously elsewhere. And in keeping with true Irwin Allen tradition, that explanation will not be offered here.

1964 - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Season One, Episode 7 - "Turn Back the Clock", featuring Vitina Marcus as The Native Girl. Produced by Irwin Allen.

And then there was Irwin Allen's masterful handling of the reptilian facets of The Lost World, most notably his inimitable casting of the dinosaurs. His dinosaurs were so realistic, so eerily lifelike, that they almost looked like living, breathing garden variety lizards with dinosaur fins and horns glued to their backs and heads.

The less enlightened viewer might even suppose this to be true, that Irwin's dinosaurs were indeed merely live specimens of lizards, donned in Jurassic-era finery, vastly magnified, and retro-fitted into The Lost World via some penny-wise means of cinematic trickery.

But those of us in the know certainly know better than that, as we are privy to some otherwise unpublished information about The Lost World. The lifelike appearance of the Irwin's dinosaurs can be attributed to a wholly overlooked and fiendishly cunning approach to the art of delusion, which is that the dinosaurs didn't just look real, they were real.

While the world abounds with middling minds who cannot fathom such a reality, we must follow Irwin's benevolent leanings and temper our natural feelings of contempt for this unfortunate assemblage of pedestrian lowbrows. In spite of Irwin's superior intellect, he never felt disdain toward the masses that constituted his audiences. He simply capitalized on their unaffectedness, and in the process recounted the benefits of exploiting the intellectually bereft for personal gain.

The purpose of all this analysis, of course, is to place an exclamation point on the genius of Irwin Allen, the formation of his dinosaur exposé being a premier example. Note how he mindfully manipulates the expectations of his unsuspecting audience, compelling them to probe the dinosaurs for any signs of man-made chicanery. Then, at the palatial moment when the dinosaurs make their entry, he guilefully supplants the anticipated display of faux reptilia with that of the bona fide article.

Upon first witnessing the de facto dinosaurs, some in the audience think they've been had, and indeed they have. Irwin, in engineering his masterful ruse, had used reality as his medium to convey the illusion of artifice. His audience, in essence, was blinded by the truth. It was the immaculate deception, and none but Irwin Allen could have conceived it.

Indeed, the matter of where the live dinosaurs came from has been conspicuously absent from this discussion, as the Irwinian technique of fine film making strongly discourages the practice of squandering time on extraneous justifications and other such trite means of redundant apologia. For the benefit of the incessantly curious, however, just keep in mind that Irwin Allen wrote and produced The Time Tunnel TV Series, a fact that should provide some fair insight into his modis operandi.

Carl R.

  

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde (L) shares a laugh with Madeleine Albright (R), Chair, Albright Stonebridge, Albright Capital Management, Former U.S. Secretary of State and Ali Velshi (C) moderator at Lisner Hall at George Washington University prior to the IMF Seminar: IMF 70 Years Later: Reflections and Looking Ahead at the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings April 12, 2014 in Washington, DC. IMF Staff Photograph/Stephen Jaffe

Managed to get my hands on the 'Blueberry' Kenner Blythe wig with all its bits in the original box. Even has the price on the top from 1972, £1.75. I love how old vintage things make you feel like your going back in time ^^

Managed some good light.

Managed to capture a hoverfly before it landed on this flower.

Managed to get a decent photo of the dog, for once. Just a crappy cameraphone shot to send back to its owner in Slovakia, but it turned out slightly better than expected.

Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, President of Queensâ College at Cambridge University Mohamed El-Erian, Nigeriaâs Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning Zainab Ahmed, Canadian economist and banker Mark Carney, Minister for Finance of Ireland Paschal Donohoe, and CNN'sâ¯international businessâ¯correspondent Richard Quest participate in the Debate on Global Economy Seminar during the 2022 Annual Meetings at the International Monetary Fund.

 

IMF Photo/Joshua Roberts

13 October 2022

Washington, DC, United States

Photo ref: _JR15574.ARW

Mischief Managed is SL’s premier Hogwarts roleplaying community. Featuring an exclusive mesh castle & grounds, you can live out your own magical story just as Harry Potter did!! (To join our roleplay, you must apply at mischiefmanagedsl.net )

 

Visit this location at Mischief Managed RP (Landing Point/Public) in Second Life

A wee selfie of a very sweaty, tired me after a 3 hour trek turned into a 5 hour one :(

I managed a whole hour's ride without any near death experiences. Definitely one for the diary.

 

I've been a cyclist for many years but in the last six months have been getting in far more rides than usual. And it seems that on virtually every ride I will have a close brush with death when some moronic motorist, who can't bear to slow down or wait a few seconds before passing safely, will go past me far too close or far too fast or, as happened two days ago, both.

 

Friday's NDE (near death experience) was the worst by far. I was cycling along a left hand bend when I suddenly heard a vehicle approaching at speed. Great speed. Then this van went past me doing around 60-70MPH, missing me by a matter of inches and also missing the van coming the other way by inches. At the time I mostly felt annoyance, but the following day I think the shock of it had kicked in and I felt really quite depressed and grumpy. After one of these NDEs happens it leaves me feeling like it's a matter of when - not if - I will be killed on a ride.

 

So today it was a pleasant surprise and a relief to get a ride in without a NDE.

 

strobist.com - 2 x elinchrom d lite 4 it, either side of subject, 66cm soft boxes, skyport trigger

The Palace of Versailles is a former royal residence commissioned by King Louis XIV located in Versailles, about 19 kilometers (12 mi) west of Paris, France.

 

The palace is owned by the French Republic and since 1995 has been managed, under the direction of the French Ministry of Culture, by the Public Establishment of the Palace, Museum and National Estate of Versailles. About 15,000,000 people visit the palace, park, or gardens of Versailles every year, making it one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world.

 

Louis XIII built a simple hunting lodge on the site of the Palace of Versailles in 1623. With his death came Louis XIV who expanded the château into the beginnings of a palace that went through several changes and phases from 1661 to 1715. It was a favorite residence for both kings, and in 1682, Louis XIV moved the seat of his court and government to Versailles, making the palace the de facto capital of France. This state of affairs was continued by Kings Louis XV and Louis XVI, who primarily made interior alterations to the palace, but in 1789 the royal family and capital of France returned to Paris. For the rest of the French Revolution, the Palace of Versailles was largely abandoned and emptied of its contents, and the population of the surrounding city plummeted.

 

Napoleon, following his coronation as Emperor, used Versailles as a summer residence from 1810 to 1814, but did not restore it. Following the Bourbon Restoration, when the king was returned to the throne, he resided in Paris and it was not until the 1830s that meaningful repairs were made to the palace. A museum of French history was installed within it, replacing the apartments of the southern wing.

 

The palace and park were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979 for its importance as the center of power, art, and science in France during the 17th and 18th centuries. The French Ministry of Culture has placed the palace, its gardens, and some of its subsidiary structures on its list of culturally significant monuments.

 

History

Main article: History of the Palace of Versailles

An engraving of Louis XIII's château as it appeared in 1652

Versailles around 1652, engraving by Jacques Gomboust [fr]

In 1623, Louis XIII, King of France, built a hunting lodge on a hill in a favorite hunting ground, 19 kilometers (12 mi) west of Paris and 16 kilometers (10 mi) from his primary residence, the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye The site, near a village named Versailles, was a wooded wetland that Louis XIII's court scorned as being generally unworthy of a king; one of his courtiers, François de Bassompierre, wrote that the lodge "would not inspire vanity in even the simplest gentleman". From 1631 to 1634, architect Philibert Le Roy replaced the lodge with a château for Louis XIII, who forbade his queen, Anne of Austria, from staying there overnight, even when an outbreak of smallpox at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1641 forced Louis XIII to relocate to Versailles with his three-year-old heir, the future Louis XIV.

 

When Louis XIII died in 1643, Anne became Louis XIV's regent, and Louis XIII's château was abandoned for the next decade. She moved the court back to Paris, where Anne and her chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, continued Louis XIII's unpopular monetary practices. This led to the Fronde, a series of revolts against royal authority from 1648 to 1653 that masked a struggle between Mazarin and the princes of the blood, Louis XIV's extended family, for influence over him. In the aftermath of the Fronde, Louis XIV became determined to rule alone. Following Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV reformed his government to exclude his mother and the princes of the blood, moved the court back to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and ordered the expansion of his father's château at Versailles into a palace.

 

Louis XIV had hunted at Versailles in the 1650s, but did not take any special interest in Versailles until 1661. On 17 August 1661, Louis XIV was a guest at a sumptuous festival hosted by Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances, at his palatial residence, the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte. Louis XIV was impressed by the château and its gardens, which were the work of Louis Le Vau, the court architect since 1654, André Le Nôtre, the royal gardener since 1657, and Charles Le Brun, a painter in royal service since 1647. Vaux-le-Vicomte's scale and opulence inspired Louis XIV's aesthetic sense, but also led him to imprison Fouquet that September, as he had also built an island fortress and a private army. Louis XIV was also inspired by Vaux-le-Vicomte, and he recruited its authors for his own projects. Louis XIV replaced Fouquet with Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a protégé of Mazarin and enemy of Fouquet, and charged him with managing the corps of artisans in royal employment. Colbert acted as the intermediary between them and Louis XIV, who personally directed and inspected the planning and construction of Versailles.

 

Construction

Work at Versailles was at first concentrated on gardens, and through the 1660s, Le Vau only added two detached service wings and a forecourt to the château. But in 1668–69, as a response to the growth of the gardens, and victory over Spain in the War of Devolution, Louis XIV decided to turn Versailles into a full-scale royal residence. He vacillated between replacing or incorporating his father's château, but settled on the latter by the end of the decade, and from 1668 to 1671, Louis XIII's château was encased on three sides in a feature dubbed the enveloppe. This gave the château a new, Italianate façade overlooking the gardens, but preserved the courtyard façade, resulting in a mix of styles and materials that dismayed Louis XIV and that Colbert described as a "patchwork". Attempts to homogenize the two façades failed, and in 1670 Le Vau died, leaving the post of First Architect to the King vacant for the next seven years.

 

Le Vau was succeeded at Versailles by his assistant, architect François d'Orbay. Work at the palace during the 1670s focused on its interiors, as the palace was then nearing completion, though d'Orbay expanded Le Vau's service wings and connected them to the château, and built a pair of pavilions for government employees in the forecourt. In 1670, d'Orbay was tasked by Louis XIV with designing a city, also called Versailles, to house and service Louis XIV's growing government and court. The granting of land to courtiers for the construction of townhouses that resembled the palace began in 1671. The next year, the Franco-Dutch War began and funding for Versailles was cut until 1674, when Louis XIV had work begun on the Ambassadors' Staircase , a grand staircase for the reception of guests, and demolished the last of the village of Versailles.

 

Following the end of the Franco-Dutch War with French victory in 1678, Louis XIV appointed as First Architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart, an experienced architect in Louis XIV's confidence, who would benefit from a restored budget and large workforce of former soldiers. Mansart began his tenure with the addition from 1678 to 1681 of the Hall of Mirrors, a renovation of the courtyard façade of Louis XIII's château, and the expansion of d'Orbay's pavilions to create the Ministers' Wings in 1678–79. Adjacent to the palace, Mansart built a pair of stables called the Grande and Petite Écuries from 1679 to 1682 and the Grand Commun, which housed the palace's servants and general kitchens, from 1682 to 1684. Mansart also added two entirely new wings in Le Vau's Italianate style to house the court, first at the south end of the palace from 1679 to 1681 and then at its north end from 1685 to 1689.

 

War and the resulting diminished funding slowed construction at Versailles for the rest of the 17th century. The Nine Years' War, which began in 1688, stopped work altogether until 1698. Three years later, however, the even more expensive War of the Spanish Succession began and, combined with poor harvests in 1693–94 and 1709–10, plunged France into crisis. Louis XIV thus slashed funding and canceled some of the work Mansart had planned in the 1680s, such as the remodeling of the courtyard façade in the Italianate style. Louis XIV and Mansart focused on a permanent palace chapel, the construction of which lasted from 1699 to 1710.

 

Louis XIV's successors, Louis XV and Louis XVI, largely left Versailles as they inherited it and focused on the palace's interiors. Louis XV's modifications began in the 1730s, with the completion of the Salon d'Hercule, a ballroom in the north wing, and the expansion of the king's private apartment, which required the demolition of the Ambassadors' Staircase In 1748, Louis XV began construction of a palace theater, the Royal Opera of Versailles at the northernmost end of the palace, but completion was delayed until 1770; construction was interrupted in the 1740s by the War of the Austrian Succession and then again in 1756 with the start of the Seven Years' War. These wars emptied the royal treasury and thereafter construction was mostly funded by Madame du Barry, Louis XV's favorite mistress. In 1771, Louis XV had the northern Ministers' Wing rebuilt in Neoclassical style by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, his court architect, as it was in the process of falling down. That work was also stopped by financial constraints, and it remained incomplete when Louis XV died in 1774. In 1784, Louis XVI briefly moved the royal family to the Château de Saint-Cloud ahead of more renovations to the Palace of Versailles, but construction could not begin because of financial difficulty and political crisis. In 1789, the French Revolution swept the royal family and government out of Versailles forever.

 

Role in politics and culture

The Palace of Versailles was key to Louis XIV's politics, as an expression and concentration of French art and culture, and for the centralization of royal power. Louis XIV first used Versailles to promote himself with a series of nighttime festivals in its gardens in 1664, 1668, and 1674, the events of which were disseminated throughout Europe by print and engravings. As early as 1669, but especially from 1678, Louis XIV sought to make Versailles his seat of government, and he expanded the palace so as to fit the court within it. The moving of the court to Versailles did not come until 1682, however, and not officially, as opinion on Versailles was mixed among the nobility of France.

 

By 1687, however, it was evident to all that Versailles was the de facto capital of France, and Louis XIV succeeded in attracting the nobility to Versailles to pursue prestige and royal patronage within a strict court etiquette, thus eroding their traditional provincial power bases. It was at the Palace of Versailles that Louis XIV received the Doge of Genoa, Francesco Maria Imperiale Lercari in 1685, an embassy from the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1686, and an embassy from Safavid Iran in 1715.[

 

Louis XIV died at Versailles on 1 September 1715 and was succeeded by his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV, then the duke of Anjou, who was moved to Vincennes and then to Paris by Louis XV's regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. Versailles was neglected until 1722, when Philippe II removed the court to Versailles to escape the unpopularity of his regency, and when Louis XV began his majority. The 1722 move, however, broke the cultural power of Versailles, and during the reign of Louis XVI, courtiers spent their leisure in Paris, not Versailles.

 

During Christmas 1763, Mozart and his family visited Versailles and dined with the kings. The 7-year-old Mozart played several works during his stay and later dedicated his first two harpsichord sonatas, published in 1764 in Paris, to Madame Victoria, daughter of Louis XV.

 

In 1783, the palace was the site of the signing of the last two of the three treaties of the Peace of Paris (1783), which ended the American Revolutionary War. On September 3, British and American delegates, led by Benjamin Franklin, signed the Treaty of Paris at the Hôtel d'York (now 56 Rue Jacob) in Paris, granting the United States independence. On September 4, Spain and France signed separate treaties with England at the Palace of Versailles, formally ending the war.

 

The King and Queen learned of the Storming of the Bastille in Paris on 14 July 1789, while they were at the palace, and remained isolated there as the Revolution in Paris spread. The growing anger in Paris led to the Women's March on Versailles on 5 October 1789. A crowd of several thousand men and women, protesting the high price and scarcity of bread, marched from the markets of Paris to Versailles. They took weapons from the city armory, besieged the palace, and compelled the King and royal family and the members of the National Assembly to return with them to Paris the following day.

 

As soon as the royal family departed, the palace was closed. In 1792, the National Convention, the new revolutionary government, ordered the transfer of all the paintings and sculptures from the palace to the Louvre. In 1793, the Convention declared the abolition of the monarchy and ordered all of the royal property in the palace to be sold at auction. The auction took place between 25 August 1793 and 11 August 1794. The furnishings and art of the palace, including the furniture, mirrors, baths, and kitchen equipment, were sold in seventeen thousand lots. All fleurs-de-lys and royal emblems on the buildings were chambered or chiseled off. The empty buildings were turned into a storehouse for furnishings, art and libraries confiscated from the nobility. The empty grand apartments were opened for tours beginning in 1793, and a small museum of French paintings and art school was opened in some of the empty rooms.

 

By virtue of an order issued by the Versailles district directorate in August 1794, the Royal Gate was destroyed, the Cour Royale was cleared and the Cour de Marbre lost its precious floor.

 

19th century – history museum and government venue

When Napoleon became Emperor of the French in 1804, he considered making Versailles his residence but abandoned the idea because of the cost of the renovation. Prior to his marriage with Marie-Louise in 1810, he had the Grand Trianon restored and refurnished as a springtime residence for himself and his family, in the style of furnishing that it is seen today.

 

In 1815, with the final downfall of Napoleon, Louis XVIII, the younger brother of Louis XVI, became King, and considered returning the royal residence to Versailles, where he had been born. He ordered the restoration of the royal apartments, but the task and cost was too great. Louis XVIII had the far end of the south wing of the Cour Royale demolished and rebuilt (1814–1824) to match the Gabriel wing of 1780 opposite, which gave greater uniformity of appearance to the front entrance. Neither he nor his successor Charles X lived at Versailles.

 

The French Revolution of 1830 brought a new monarch, Louis-Philippe to power, and a new ambition for Versailles. He did not reside at Versailles but began the creation of the Museum of the History of France, dedicated to "all the glories of France", which had been used to house some members of the royal family. The museum was begun in 1833 and inaugurated on 30 June 1837. Its most famous room is the Galerie des Batailles (Hall of Battles), which lies on most of the length of the second floor of the south wing. The museum project largely came to a halt when Louis Philippe was overthrown in 1848, though the paintings of French heroes and great battles still remain in the south wing.

 

Emperor Napoleon III used the palace on occasion as a stage for grand ceremonies. One of the most lavish was the banquet that he hosted for Queen Victoria in the Royal Opera of Versailles on 25 August 1855.

 

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, the palace was occupied by the general staff of the victorious German Army. Parts of the château, including the Gallery of Mirrors, were turned into a military hospital. The creation of the German Empire, combining Prussia and the surrounding German states under William I, was formally proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors on 18 January 1871. The Germans remained in the palace until the signing of the armistice in March 1871. In that month, the government of the new Third French Republic, which had departed Paris during the War for Tours and then Bordeaux, moved into the palace. The National Assembly held its meetings in the Opera House.

 

The uprising of the Paris Commune in March 1871, prevented the French government, under Adolphe Thiers, from returning immediately to Paris. The military operation which suppressed the Commune at the end of May was directed from Versailles, and the prisoners of the Commune were marched there and put on trial in military courts. In 1875 a second parliamentary body, the French Senate, was created and held its meetings for the election of a President of the Republic in a new hall created in 1876 in the south wing of the palace. The French Senate continues to meet in the palace on special occasions, such as the amendment of the French Constitution.

 

20th century

The end of the 19th and the early 20th century saw the beginning of restoration efforts at the palace, first led by Pierre de Nolhac, poet and scholar and the first conservator, who began his work in 1892. The conservation and restoration were interrupted by two world wars but have continued until the present day.

 

The palace returned to the world stage in June 1919, when, after six months of negotiations, the Treaty of Versailles, formally ending the First World War, was signed in the Hall of Mirrors. Between 1925 and 1928, the American philanthropist and multi-millionaire John D. Rockefeller, Jr. gave $2,166,000, the equivalent of about thirty million dollars today, to restore and refurbish the palace.

 

More work took place after World War II, with the restoration of the Royal Opera of Versailles. The theater was reopened in 1957, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.

 

In 1978, parts of the palace were heavily damaged in a bombing committed by Breton terrorists.

 

Starting in the 1950s, when the museum of Versailles was under the directorship of Gérald van der Kemp, the objective was to restore the palace to its state – or as close to it as possible – in 1789 when the royal family left the palace. Among the early projects was the repair of the roof over the Hall of Mirrors; the publicity campaign brought international attention to the plight of post-war Versailles and garnered much foreign money including a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

 

One of the more costly endeavors for the museum and France's Fifth Republic has been to repurchase as much of the original furnishings as possible. Consequently, because furniture with a royal provenance – and especially furniture that was made for Versailles – is a highly sought-after commodity on the international market, the museum has spent considerable funds on retrieving much of the palace's original furnishings.

 

21st century

In 2003, a new restoration initiative – the "Grand Versailles" project – was started, which began with the replanting of the gardens, which had lost over 10,000 trees during Cyclone Lothar on 26 December 1999. One part of the initiative, the restoration of the Hall of Mirrors, was completed in 2006. Another major project was the further restoration of the backstage areas of the Royal Opera of Versailles in 2007 to 2009.

 

The Palace of Versailles is currently owned by the French state. Its formal title is the Public Establishment of the Palace, Museum and National Estate of Versailles. Since 1995, it has been run as a Public Establishment, with an independent administration and management supervised by the French Ministry of Culture.

 

The grounds of the palace will host the equestrian competition during the 2024 Summer Olympics.

 

Architecture and plan

The Palace of Versailles is a visual history of French architecture from the 1630s to the 1780s. Its earliest portion, the corps de logis, was built for Louis XIII in the style of his reign with brick, marble, and slate, which Le Vau surrounded in the 1660s with Enveloppe, an edifice that was inspired by Renaissance-era Italian villas. When Mansart made further expansions to the palace in the 1680s, he used the Enveloppe as the model for his work. Neoclassical additions were made to the palace with the remodeling of the Ministers' Wings in the 1770s, by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, and after the Bourbon Restoration.

 

The palace was largely completed by the death of Louis XIV in 1715. The eastern facing palace has a U-shaped layout, with the corps de logis and symmetrical advancing secondary wings terminating with the Dufour Pavilion on the south and the Gabriel Pavilion to the north, creating an expansive cour d'honneur known as the Royal Court (Cour Royale). Flanking the Royal Court are two enormous asymmetrical wings that result in a façade of 402 metres (1,319 ft) in length. Covered by around a million square feet (10 hectares) of roof, the palace has 2,143 windows, 1,252 chimneys, and 67 staircases.[

 

The palace and its grounds have had a great influence on architecture and horticulture from the mid-17th century to the end of the 18th century. Examples of works influenced by Versailles include Christopher Wren's work at Hampton Court Palace, Berlin Palace, the Palace of La Granja, Stockholm Palace, Ludwigsburg Palace, Karlsruhe Palace, Rastatt Palace, Nymphenburg Palace, Schleissheim Palace, and Esterházy Palace.

 

Royal Apartments

The construction in 1668–1671 of Le Vau's enveloppe around the outside of Louis XIII's red brick and white stone château added state apartments for the king and the queen. The addition was known at the time as the château neuf (new château). The grands appartements (Grand Apartments, also referred to as the State Apartments[141][142]) include the grand appartement du roi and the grand appartement de la reine. They occupied the main or principal floor of the château neuf, with three rooms in each apartment facing the garden to the west and four facing the garden parterres to the north and south, respectively. The private apartments of the king (the appartement du roi and the petit appartement du roi) and those of the queen (the petit appartement de la reine) remained in the château vieux (old château). Le Vau's design for the state apartments closely followed Italian models of the day, including the placement of the apartments on the main floor (the piano nobile, the next floor up from the ground level), a convention the architect borrowed from Italian palace design.

 

The king's State Apartment consisted of an enfilade of seven rooms, each dedicated to one of the known planets and their associated titular Roman deity. The queen's apartment formed a parallel enfilade with that of the grand appartement du roi. After the addition of the Hall of Mirrors (1678–1684) the king's apartment was reduced to five rooms (until the reign of Louis XV, when two more rooms were added) and the queen's to four.

 

The queen's apartments served as the residence of three queens of France – Marie-Thérèse d'Autriche, wife of Louis XIV, Marie Leczinska, wife of Louis XV, and Marie-Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI. Additionally, Louis XIV's granddaughter-in-law, Princess Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy, duchesse de Bourgogne, wife of the Petit Dauphin, occupied these rooms from 1697 (the year of her marriage) to her death in 1712.

 

Ambassador's Staircase

The Ambassadors' Staircase (Escalier des Ambassadeurs) was an imperial staircase built from 1674 to 1680 by d'Orbay. Until Louis XV had it demolished in 1752 to create a courtyard for his private apartments, the staircase was the primary entrance into the Palace of Versailles and the royal apartments especially. It was entered from the courtyard via a vestibule that, cramped and dark, contrasted greatly with the tall, open space of the staircase – famously lit naturally with a skylight – so as to overawe visitors.

 

The staircase and walls of the room that contained it were clad in polychrome marble and gilded bronze, with decor in the Ionic order. Le Brun and painted the walls and ceiling of the room according to a festive theme to celebrate Louis XIV's victory in the Franco-Dutch War. On the wall immediately above the staircase were trompe-l'œil paintings of people from the Four Parts of the World looking into the staircase over a balustrade, a motif repeated on the ceiling fresco. There they were joined by allegorical figures for the twelve months of the year and various Classical Greek figures such as the Muses. A marble bust of Louis XIV, sculpted by Jean Warin in 1665–66, was placed in a niche above the first landing of the staircase.

 

The State Apartments of the King

The construction of the Hall of Mirrors between 1678 and 1686 coincided with a major alteration to the State Apartments. They were originally intended as his residence, but the King transformed them into galleries for his finest paintings, and venues for his many receptions for courtiers. During the season from All-Saints Day in November until Easter, these were usually held three times a week, from six to ten in the evening, with various entertainments.

 

The Salon of Hercules

This was originally a chapel. It was rebuilt beginning in 1712 under the supervision of the First Architect of the King, Robert de Cotte, to showcase two paintings by Paolo Veronese, Eleazar and Rebecca and Meal at the House of Simon the Pharisee, which was a gift to Louis XIV from the Republic of Venice in 1664. The painting on the ceiling, The Apotheosis of Hercules, by François Lemoyne, was completed in 1736, and gave the room its name.

 

The Salon of Abundance

The Salon of Abundance was the antechamber to the Cabinet of Curios (now the Games Room), which displayed Louis XIV's collection of precious jewels and rare objects. Some of the objects in the collection are depicted in René-Antoine Houasse's painting Abundance and Liberality (1683), located on the ceiling over the door opposite the windows.

 

The Salon of Venus

This salon was used for serving light meals during evening receptions. The principal feature in this room is Jean Warin's life-size statue of Louis XIV in the costume of a Roman emperor. On the ceiling in a gilded oval frame is another painting by Houasse, Venus subjugating the Gods and Powers (1672–1681). Trompe-l'œil paintings and sculpture around the ceiling illustrate mythological themes.

 

The Salon of Mercury

The Salon of Mercury was the original State Bedchamber when Louis XIV officially moved the court and government to the palace in 1682. The bed is a replica of the original commissioned by King Louis-Philippe in the 19th century when he turned the palace into a museum. The ceiling paintings by the Flemish artist Jean Baptiste de Champaigne depict the god Mercury in his chariot, drawn by a rooster, and Alexander the Great and Ptolemy surrounded by scholars and philosophers. The Automaton Clock was made for the King by the royal clockmaker Antoine Morand in 1706. When it chimes the hour, figures of Louis XIV and Fame descend from a cloud.

 

The Salon of Mars

The Salon of Mars was used by the royal guards until 1782, and was decorated on a military theme with helmets and trophies. It was turned into a concert room between 1684 and 1750, with galleries for musicians on either side. Portraits of Louis XV and his Queen, Marie Leszczinska, by the Flemish artist Carle Van Loo decorate the room today.

 

The Salon of Apollo

The Salon of Apollo was the royal throne room under Louis XIV, and was the setting for formal audiences. The eight-foot-high silver throne was melted down in 1689 to help pay the costs of an expensive war, and was replaced by a more modest throne of gilded wood. The central painting on the ceiling, by Charles de la Fosse, depicts the Sun Chariot of Apollo, the King's favorite emblem, pulled by four horses and surrounded by the four seasons.

 

The Salon of Diana

The Salon of Diana was used by Louis XIV as a billiards room, and had galleries from which courtiers could watch him play. The decoration of the walls and ceiling depicts scenes from the life of the goddess Diana. The celebrated bust of Louis XIV by Bernini made during the famous sculptor's visit to France in 1665 is on display here.

 

Private apartments of the King and Queen

The apartments of the King were the heart of the château; they were in the same location as the rooms of Louis XIII, the creator of the château, on the first floor (second floor US style). They were set aside for the personal use of Louis XIV in 1683. He and his successors Louis XV and Louis XVI used these rooms for official functions, such as the ceremonial lever ("waking up") and the coucher ("going to bed") of the monarch, which was attended by a crowd of courtiers.

 

The King's apartment was accessed from the Hall of Mirrors from the Oeil de Boeuf antechamber or from the Guardroom and the Grand Couvert, the ceremonial room where Louis XIV often took his evening meals, seated alone at a table in front of the fireplace. His spoon, fork, and knife were brought to him in a golden box. The courtiers could watch as he dined.

 

The King's bedchamber had originally been a Drawing Room before Louis XIV transformed it into his own bedroom in 1701. He died there on 1 September 1715. Both Louis XV and Louis XVI continued to use the bedroom for their official awakening and going to bed. On 6 October 1789, from the balcony of this room Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, joined by the Marquis de Lafayette, looked down on the hostile crowd in the courtyard, shortly before the King was forced to return to Paris.

 

The bed of the King is placed beneath a carved relief by Nicolas Coustou entitled France watching over the sleeping King. The decoration includes several paintings set into the paneling, including a self-portrait of Antony van Dyck.

 

Private apartments of The Queen

The petit appartement de la reine is a suite of rooms that were reserved for the personal use of the queen. Originally arranged for the use of the Marie-Thérèse, consort of Louis XIV, the rooms were later modified for use by Marie Leszczyńska and finally for Marie-Antoinette. The Queen's apartments and the King's Apartments were laid out on the same design, each suite having seven rooms. Both suites had ceilings painted with scenes from mythology; the King's ceilings featured male figures, the Queen's featured females.

 

Hall of Mirrors

The Hall of Mirrors is a long gallery at the westernmost part of the palace that looks out onto the gardens. The hall was built from 1678 to 1681 on the site of a terrace Le Vau built between the king and queen's suites. The hall is clad in marble and decorated in a modified version of the Corinthian order, with 578 mirrors facing 17 windows and reflecting the light provided by them. The ceiling fresco, painted by Le Brun over the next four years, embellishes the first 18 years of Louis XIV's reign in 30 scenes, 17 of which are military victories over the Dutch. The fresco depicts Louis XIV himself alongside Classical figures in the scenes celebrating moments in his reign such as the beginning of personal rule in 1661, breaking from earlier frescoes at Versailles that used allegories derived from Classical and mythological scenes.

 

The Salon of War and the Salon of Peace bookend the Hall of Mirrors on its northern and southern ends respectively. The Salon of War, constructed and decorated from 1678 to 1686, celebrates French victories in the Franco-Dutch War with marble panels, gilded bronze trophies of arms, and a stucco bas-relief of Louis XIV on horsebask riding over his enemies. The Salon of Peace is decorated in the same fashion but according to its eponymous theme.

 

Royal Chapel

The Royal Chapel of Versailles is located at the southern end of the north wing. The building stands 40-meter (130 ft) high, and measures 42 meters (138 ft) long and 24 meters (79 ft) wide. The chapel is rectangular with a semicircular apse, combining traditional, Gothic royal French church architecture with the French Baroque style of Versailles. The ceiling of the chapel is constituted by an unbroken vault, divided into three frescos by Antoine Coypel, Charles de La Fosse, and Jean Jouvenet. The palette of motifs beneath the frescoes glorify the deeds of Louis IX, and include images of David, Constantine, Charlemagne, and Louis IX, fleur de lis, and Louis XIV's monogram. The organ of the chapel was built by Robert Clicquot and Julien Tribuot in 1709–1710.

 

Louis XIV commissioned the chapel, its sixth, from Mansart and Le Brun in 1683–84. It was the last building constructed at Versailles during Louis XIV's reign. Construction was delayed until 1699, however, and it was not completed until 1710. The only major modification to the chapel since its completion was the removal of a lantern from its roof in 1765. A full restoration of the chapel began in late 2017 and lasted into early 2021.

 

Royal Opera

The Royal Opera of Versailles was originally commissioned by Louis XIV in 1682 and was to be built at the end of the North Wing with a design by Mansart and Vigarani. However, due to the expense of the King's continental wars, the project was put aside. The idea was revived by Louis XV with a new design by Ange-Jacques Gabriel in 1748, but this was also temporarily put aside. The project was revived and rushed ahead for the planned celebration of the marriage of the Dauphin, the future Louis XVI, and Marie-Antoinette. For economy and speed, the new opera was built almost entirely of wood, which also gave it very high quality acoustics. The wood was painted to resemble marble, and the ceiling was decorated with a painting of the Apollo, the god of the arts, preparing crowns for illustrious artists, by Louis Jean-Jacques Durameau. The sculptor Augustin Pajou added statuary and reliefs to complete the decoration. The new Opera was inaugurated on 16 May 1770, as part of the celebration of the royal wedding.

 

In October 1789, early in the French Revolution, the last banquet for the royal guardsmen was hosted by the King in the opera, before he departed for Paris. Following the Franco-German War in 1871 and then the Paris Commune until 1875, the French National Assembly met in the opera, until the proclamation of the Third French Republic and the return of the government to Paris.

 

Museum of the History of France

Shortly after becoming King in 1830, Louis Philippe I decided to transform the palace into a museum devoted to "All the Glories of France," with paintings and sculpture depicting famous French victories and heroes. Most of the apartments of the palace were entirely demolished (in the main building, practically all of the apartments were annihilated, with only the apartments of the king and queen remaining almost intact), and turned into a series of several large rooms and galleries: the Coronation Room (whose original volume was left untouched by Louis-Philippe), which displays the celebrated painting of the coronation of Napoleon I by Jacques-Louis David; the Hall of Battles; commemorating French victories with large-scale paintings; and the 1830 room, which celebrated Louis-Philippe's own coming to power in the French Revolution of 1830. Some paintings were brought from the Louvre, including works depicting events in French history by Philippe de Champaigne, Pierre Mignard, Laurent de La Hyre, Charles Le Brun, Adam Frans van der Meulen, Nicolas de Largillière, Hyacinthe Rigaud, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Jean-Marc Nattier, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Hubert Robert, Thomas Lawrence, Jacques-Louis David, and Antoine-Jean Gros. Others were commissioned especially for the museum by prominent artists of the early 19th century, including Eugène Delacroix, who painted Saint Louis at the French victory over the British in the Battle of Taillebourg in 1242. Other painters featured include Horace Vernet and François Gérard. A monumental painting by Vernet features Louis Philippe himself, with his sons, posing in front of the gates of the palace.

 

The overthrow of Louis Philippe in 1848 put an end to his grand plans for the museum, but the Gallery of Battles is still as it was, and is passed through by many visitors to the royal apartments and grand salons. Another set of rooms on the first floor has been made into galleries on Louis XIV and his court, displaying furniture, paintings, and sculptures. In recent years, eleven rooms on the ground floor between the Chapel and the Opera have been turned into a history of the palace, with audiovisual displays and models.

 

Estate of Versailles

The estate of Versailles consists of the palace, the subsidiary buildings around it, and its park and gardens. As of June 2021, the estate altogether covers an area of 800 hectares (8.0 km2; 2,000 acres), with the park and gardens laid out to the south, west, and north of the palace. The palace is approached from the east by the Avenue de Paris, measuring 17 miles (27 km) from Paris to a gate between the Grande and Petite Écuries. Beyond these stables is the Place d'Armes, where the Avenue de Paris meets the Avenue de Sceaux and Avenue de Saint-Cloud (see map), the three roads that formed the main arteries of the city of Versailles. Exactly where the three roads meet is a gate leading into the cour d'honneur. hemmed in by the Ministers' Wings. Beyond is the Royal Gate and the main palace, which wraps around the Royal and finally Marble Courts

 

The estate was established by Louis XIII as a hunting retreat, with a park just to the west of his château. From 1661, Louis XIV expanded the estate until, at its greatest extent, the estate was made up by the Grand Parc , a hunting ground of 15,000 hectares (150 km2; 37,000 acres), and the gardens, called the Petit Parc, which covered 1,700 hectares (17 km2; 4,200 acres). A 25-mile (40 km) long, 10-foot (3.0 m) high wall with 24 gateways enclosed the estate.

 

The landscape of the estate had to be created from the bog that surrounded Louis XIII's château using landscape architecture usually employed in fortress building. The approach to the palace and the gardens were carefully laid out via the moving of earth and construction of terraces. The water from the marsh was marshalled into a series of lakes and ponds around Versailles, but these reservoirs were not sufficient for the palace, city, or gardens. Great lengths were taken to supply Versailles with water, such as the damming of the river Bièvre to create an inflow in the 1660s, the construction of an enormous pumping station at the river Seine near Marly-le-Roi in 1681, and an attempt to divert water from the river Eure with a canal in the later 1680s.

 

Gardens

The gardens of Versailles, as they have existed since the reign of Louis XIV, are the work of André Le Nôtre. Le Nôtre's gardens were preceded by a simple garden laid out in the 1630s by landscape architects Jacques Boyceau and Jacques de Nemours, which he rearranged along an east–west axis that, because of Louis XIV's land purchases and the clearing of woodland, were expanded literally as far as could be seen. The resulting gardens were a collaboration between Le Nôtre, Le Brun, Colbert, and Louis XIV, marked by rigid order, discipline, and open space, with axial paths, flowerbeds, hedges, and ponds and lakes as motifs. They became the epitome of the French formal garden style, and have been very influential and widely imitated or reproduced.

 

Subsidiary structures

The first of the subsidiary structures of the Palace of Versailles was the Versailles Menagerie [fr],[199][200] built by Le Vau between the years 1662 and 1664, at the southern end of the Grand Canal. The apartments, overlooking the pens, were renovated by Mansart from 1698 to 1700, but the Menagerie fell into disuse in 1712. After a long period of decay, it was demolished in 1801. The Versailles Orangery, just to the south of the palace, was first built by Le Vau in 1663, originally as part of the general moving of earth to create the Estate.[191] It was also modified by Mansart, who, from 1681 to 1685, totally rebuilt it and doubled its size.

 

In late 1679, Louis XIV commissioned Mansart to build the Château de Marly, a retreat at the edge of Versailles's estate, about 5 miles (8.0 km) from the palace. The château consisted of a primary residential building and twelve pavilions, in Palladian style placed in two rows on either side of the main building. Construction was completed in 1686, when Louis XIV spent his first night there. The château was nationalized and sold in 1799, and subsequently demolished and replaced with industrial buildings. These were themselves demolished in 1805, and then in 1811 the estate was purchased by Napoleon. On 1 June 2009, the grounds of the Château de Marly were ceded to the Public Establishment of the Palace, Museum and National Estate of Versailles.

 

La Lanterne, is a hunting lodge named after the lantern that topped the nearby Menagerie that was built in 1787 by Philippe Louis de Noailles, then the palace governor. It has since 1960 been a state residence.

 

Petit Trianon

The Petit Trianon, whose construction from 1762 to 1768 led to the advent of the names "Grand" and "Petit Trianon", was constructed for Louis XV and the Madame du Barry in the Neoclassical style by Gabriel. The building has a piano nobile, basement, and attic, with five windows on each floor. On becoming king, Louis XVI gave the Petit Trianon to Marie Antoinette, who remodeled it, relaid its gardens in the then-current English and Oriental styles, and formed her own court there.

 

In 1668, Louis XIV purchased and demolished the hamlet of Trianon, near the northern tip of the Grand Canal, and in its place, he commissioned Le Vau to construct a retreat from court, remembered as the Porcelain Trianon. Designed and built by Le Vau in 1670, it was the first example of Chinoiserie (faux Chinese) architecture in Europe, though it was largely designed in French style. The roof was clad not with porcelain but with delftware, and was thus prone to leaks, so in 1687 Louis XIV ordered it demolished. Nevertheless, the Porcelain Trianon was itself influential and copycats were built across Europe.

 

The Grand Trianon

The Grand Trianon with courtyard and gardens. The wing at left is a residence of the President of France.

The Grand Trianon with courtyard and gardens. The wing at left is a residence of the President of France.

 

To replace the Porcelain Trianon, Louis XIV tasked Mansart with the construction in 1687 of the Grand Trianon, built from marble in three months. The Grand Trianon has a single story, except for its attached service wing, which was modified by Mansart in 1705–06. The east façade has a courtyard while the west faces the gardens of the Grand Trianon, and between them a peristyle. The interiors are mostly original,[214] and housed Louis XIV, the Madame de Maintenon, Marie Leszczynska, and Napoleon, who ordered restorations to the building. Under de Gaulle, the north wing of the Grand Trianon became a residence of the President of France.

 

The Queen's hamlet and Theater

Near the Trianons are the French pavilion, built by Gabriel in 1750 between the two residences, and the Queen's Theater and Queen's Hamlet, built by architect Richard Mique in 1780 and from 1783 to 1785 respectively. These were both built at the behest of Marie Antoinette; the theater, hidden in the gardens, indulged her appreciation of opera and is absolutely original, and the hamlet to extend her gardens with rustic amenities. The building scheme of the Queen's Hamlet includes a farmhouse (the farm was to produce milk and eggs for the queen), a dairy, a dovecote, a boudoir, a barn that burned down during the French Revolution, a mill and a tower in the form of a lighthouse.

 

Modern political and ceremonial functions

The palace still serves political functions. Heads of state are regaled in the Hall of Mirrors; the bicameral French Parliament—consisting of the Senate (Sénat) and the National Assembly (Assemblée nationale)—meet in joint session (a congress of the French Parliament) in Versailles to revise or otherwise amend the French Constitution, a tradition that came into effect with the promulgation of the 1875 Constitution. For example, the Parliament met in joint session at Versailles to pass constitutional amendments in June 1999 (for domestic applicability of International Criminal Court decisions and for gender equality in candidate lists), in January 2000 (ratifying the Treaty of Amsterdam), and in March 2003 (specifying the "decentralized organization" of the French Republic).

 

In 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the global financial crisis before a congress in Versailles, the first time that this had been done since 1848, when Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte gave an address before the French Second Republic. Following the November 2015 Paris attacks, President François Hollande gave a speech before a rare joint session of parliament at the Palace of Versailles. This was the third time since 1848 that a French president addressed a joint session of the French Parliament at Versailles. The president of the National Assembly has an official apartment at the Palace of Versailles. In 2023 a state visit by Charles III to France included a state banquet at the Palace.

Mischief Managed is SL’s premier Hogwarts roleplaying community. Featuring an exclusive mesh castle & grounds, you can live out your own magical story just as Harry Potter did!! (To join our roleplay, you must apply at mischiefmanagedsl.net )

 

Visit this location at Mischief Managed RP (Landing Point/Public) in Second Life

Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva arrives to the Global Center on Adaptation.

 

IMF Photo/Eric Kampherbeek

5 September 2022

Rotterdam, Netherlands

Photo ref: 220905_0081_IMF_2000px.jpg

Managed to avoid the masses of tourists at Peggy's Cove today and still find subjects. The parking lots were full and it was a challenge to shoot without people in the way.

Great night, managed to sneak a shot from the choir stalls while waiting for our grand finale performance. Lost my lens cap though...

Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub Benoît Cœuré, and Professor at Cornell University and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution Eswar Prasad participate in “The Digital Money Revolution” seminar moderated by Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times Martin Wolf during the 2021 Annual Meetings at the International Monetary Fund.

 

IMF Photo/Joshua Roberts

15 October 2021

Washington, DC, United States

Photo ref: JR2110323082.jpg

Managed to get a picture after landing at Manchester from Dubai

Managed to get people crossing equally spread.

 

Western Canada, Section 5: Vancouver Island, Port Hardy - Holberg - North Coast Trail

Managed to shoot 2 rolls this week.

 

Leica MP - Summicron ASPH 35mm | Kodak Tri-X 400@800, Rodinal 1/50 | Scanned with Pakon F135+

Kew Gardens is the world's largest collection of living plants. Founded in 1840 from the exotic garden at Kew Park in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, UK, its living collections include more than 30,000 different kinds of plants, while the herbarium, which is one of the largest in the world, has over seven million preserved plant specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London's top tourist attractions. In 2003, the gardens were put on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites.

 

Kew Gardens, together with the botanic gardens at Wakehurst Place in Sussex, are managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (brand name Kew), an internationally important botanical research and education institution that employs 750 staff, and is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

 

The Kew site, which has been dated as formally starting in 1759, though can be traced back to the exotic garden at Kew Park, formed by Lord Capel John of Tewkesbury, consists of 121 hectares (300 acres) of gardens and botanical glasshouses, four Grade I listed buildings and 36 Grade II listed structures, all set in an internationally significant landscape.

 

Kew Gardens has its own police force, Kew Constabulary, which has been in operation since 1847.

 

History

Kew, the area in which Kew Gardens are situated, consists mainly of the gardens themselves and a small surrounding community. Royal residences in the area which would later influence the layout and construction of the gardens began in 1299 when Edward I moved his court to a manor house in neighbouring Richmond (then called Sheen). That manor house was later abandoned; however, Henry V built Sheen Palace in 1501, which, under the name Richmond Palace, became a permanent royal residence for Henry VII. Around the start of the 16th century courtiers attending Richmond Palace settled in Kew and built large houses. Early royal residences at Kew included Mary Tudor's house, which was in existence by 1522 when a driveway was built to connect it to the palace at Richmond. Around 1600, the land that would become the gardens was known as Kew Field, a large field strip farmed by one of the new private estates.

 

The exotic garden at Kew Park, formed by Lord Capel John of Tewkesbury, was enlarged and extended by Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, the widow of Frederick, Prince of Wales. The origins of Kew Gardens can be traced to the merging of the royal estates of Richmond and Kew in 1772. William Chambers built several garden structures, including the lofty Chinese pagoda built in 1761 which still remains. George III enriched the gardens, aided by William Aiton and Sir Joseph Banks. The old Kew Park (by then renamed the White House), was demolished in 1802. The "Dutch House" adjoining was purchased by George III in 1781 as a nursery for the royal children. It is a plain brick structure now known as Kew Palace.

 

Some early plants came from the walled garden established by William Coys at Stubbers in North Ockendon. The collections grew somewhat haphazardly until the appointment of the first collector, Francis Masson, in 1771. Capability Brown, who became England's most renowned landscape architect, applied for the position of master gardener at Kew, and was rejected.

 

In 1840 the gardens were adopted as a national botanical garden, in large part due to the efforts of the Royal Horticultural Society and its president William Cavendish. Under Kew's director, William Hooker, the gardens were increased to 30 hectares (75 acres) and the pleasure grounds, or arboretum, extended to 109 hectares (270 acres), and later to its present size of 121 hectares (300 acres). The first curator was John Smith.

 

The Palm House was built by architect Decimus Burton and iron-maker Richard Turner between 1844 and 1848, and was the first large-scale structural use of wrought iron. It is considered " the world's most important surviving Victorian glass and iron structure." The structure's panes of glass are all hand-blown. The Temperate House, which is twice as large as the Palm House, followed later in the 19th century. It is now the largest Victorian glasshouse in existence. Kew was the location of the successful effort in the 19th century to propagate rubber trees for cultivation outside South America.

 

In February 1913, the Tea House was burned down by suffragettes Olive Wharry and Lilian Lenton during a series of arson attacks in London.[19] Kew Gardens lost hundreds of trees in the Great Storm of 1987. From 1959 to 2007 Kew Gardens had the tallest flagpole in Britain. Made from a single Douglas-fir from Canada, it was given to mark both the centenary of the Canadian Province of British Columbia and the bicentenary of Kew Gardens. The flagpole was removed after damage by weather and woodpeckers.

 

In July 2003, the gardens were put on the list of World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.

 

Features

Treetop walkway

A new treetop walkway opened in 2008. This walkway is 18 metres (59 ft) high and 200 metres (660 ft) long and takes visitors into the tree canopy of a woodland glade. Visitors can ascend and descend by stairs or by a lift. The floor of the walkway is made from perforated metal and flexes as it is walked upon. The entire structure sways in the wind.

  

Sackler Crossing

The Sackler Crossing bridge, made of granite and bronze, opened in May 2006. Designed by Buro Happold and John Pawson, it crosses the lake and is named in honour of philanthropists Dr Mortimer and Theresa Sackler.

 

The minimalist-styled bridge is designed as a sweeping double curve of black granite. The sides of the bridge are formed of bronze posts that give the impression, from certain angles, of forming a solid wall whereas from others, and to those on the bridge, they are clearly individual entities that allow a view of the water beyond.

 

The bridge forms part of a path designed to encourage visitors to visit more of the gardens than had hitherto been popular and connects the two art galleries, via the Temperate and Evolution Houses and the woodland glade, to the Minka House and the Bamboo Garden.

 

The crossing won a special award from the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2008.

 

Vehicular tour

Kew Explorer is a service that takes a circular route around the gardens, provided by two 72-seater road trains that are fuelled by Calor Gas to minimise pollution. A commentary is provided by the driver and there are several stops.

   

Compost heap

Kew has one of the largest compost heaps in Europe, made from green and woody waste from the gardens and the manure from the stables of the Household Cavalry. The compost is mainly used in the gardens, but on occasion has been auctioned as part of a fundraising event for the gardens.

 

The compost heap is in an area of the gardens not accessible to the public, but a viewing platform, made of wood which had been illegally traded but seized by Customs officers in HMRC, has been erected to allow visitors to observe the heap as it goes through its cycle.

 

Guided walks

Free tours of the gardens are conducted daily by trained volunteers.

 

Plant houses

 

Alpine House

A narrow semicircular building of glass and steel latticework stands at the right, set amid an area of worked rock with a line of deciduous trees in the rear left, under a blue sky filled with large puffy white clouds. In front of it, curving slightly away to the left, is a wooden platform with benches on it and a thin metal guardrail in front of a low wet area with bright red flowers

 

In March 2006, the Davies Alpine House opened, the third version of an alpine house since 1887. Although only 16 metres (52 ft) long the apex of the roof arch extends to a height of 10 metres (33 ft) in order to allow the natural airflow of a building of this shape to aid in the all-important ventilation required for the type of plants to be housed.

 

The new house features a set of automatically operated blinds that prevent it overheating when the sun is too hot for the plants together with a system that blows a continuous stream of cool air over the plants. The main design aim of the house is to allow maximum light transmission. To this end the glass is of a special low iron type that allows 90 per cent of the ultraviolet light in sunlight to pass. It is attached by high tension steel cables so that no light is obstructed by traditional glazing bars.

 

To conserve energy the cooling air is not refrigerated but is cooled by being passed through a labyrinth of pipes buried under the house at a depth where the temperature remains suitable all year round. The house is designed so that the maximum temperature should not exceed 20 °C (68 °F).

 

Kew's collection of Alpine plants (defined as those that grow above the tree-line in their locale – ground level at the poles rising to over 2,000 metres (6,562 feet)), extends to over 7000. As the Alpine House can only house around 200 at a time the ones on show are regularly rotated.

  

The Nash Conservatory

Originally designed for Buckingham Palace, this was moved to Kew in 1836 by King William IV. With an abundance of natural light, the building is used various exhibitions, weddings, and private events. It is also now used to exhibit the winners of the photography competition.

  

Kew Orangery

The Orangery was designed by Sir William Chambers, and was completed in 1761. It measures 28 by 10 metres (92 by 33 ft). It was found to be too dark for its intended purpose of growing citrus plants and they were moved out in 1841. After many changes of use, it is currently used as a restaurant.

  

The Palm House and Parterre

The Palm House (1844–1848) was the result of cooperation between architect Decimus Burton and iron founder Richard Turner,[28] and continues upon the glass house design principles developed by John Claudius Loudon[29][30] and Joseph Paxton. A space frame of wrought iron arches, held together by horizontal tubular structures containing long prestressed cables,[30][31] supports glass panes which were originally[28] tinted green with copper oxide to reduce the significant heating effect. The 19m high central nave is surrounded by a walkway at 9m height, allowing visitors a closer look upon the palm tree crowns. In front of the Palm House on the east side are the Queen's Beasts, ten statues of animals bearing shields. They are Portland stone replicas of originals done by James Woodford and were placed here in 1958.[32]

  

Princess of Wales Conservatory

Kew's third major conservatory, the Princess of Wales Conservatory, designed by architect Gordon Wilson, was opened in 1987 by Diana, Princess of Wales in commemoration of her predecessor Augusta's associations with Kew. In 1989 the conservatory received the Europa Nostra award for conservation.[34] The conservatory houses ten computer-controlled micro-climatic zones, with the bulk of the greenhouse volume composed of Dry Tropics and Wet Tropics plants. Significant numbers of orchids, water lilies, cacti, lithops, carnivorous plants and bromeliads are housed in the various zones. The cactus collection also extends outside the conservatory where some hardier species can be found.

 

The conservatory has an area of 4499 square metres. As it is designed to minimise the amount of energy taken to run it, the cooler zones are grouped around the outside and the more tropical zones are in the central area where heat is conserved. The glass roof extends down to the ground, giving the conservatory a distinctive appearance and helping to maximise the use of the sun's energy.

 

During the construction of the conservatory a time capsule was buried. It contains the seeds of basic crops and endangered plant species and key publications on conservation.

 

Rhizotron

 

The Rhizotron

A rhizotron opened at the same time as the "treetop walkway", giving visitors the opportunity to investigate what happens beneath the ground where trees grow. The rhizotron is essentially a single gallery containing a set of large bronze abstract castings which contain LCD screens that carry repeating loops of information about the life of trees.

 

Temperate House

 

Inside the Temperate House

The Temperate House, currently closed for restoration, is a greenhouse that has twice the floor area of the Palm House and is the world's largest surviving Victorian glass structure. When in use it contained plants and trees from all the temperate regions of the world. It was commissioned in 1859 and designed by architect Decimus Burton and ironfounder Richard Turner. Covering 4880 square metres, it rises to a height of 19 metres. Intended to accommodate Kew's expanding collection of hardy and temperate plants, it took 40 years to construct, during which time costs soared. The building was restored during 2014 - 15 by Donald Insall Associates, based on their conservation management plan.

 

There is a viewing gallery in the central section from which visitors were able to look down on that part of the collection.

 

Waterlily House

The Waterlily House is the hottest and most humid of the houses at Kew and contains a large pond with varieties of water lily, surrounded by a display of economically important heat-loving plants. It closes during the winter months.

 

It was built to house the Victoria amazonica, the largest of the Nymphaeaceae family of water lilies. This plant was originally transported to Kew in phials of clean water and arrived in February 1849, after several prior attempts to transport seeds and roots had failed. Although various other members of the Nymphaeaceae family grew well, the house did not suit the Victoria, purportedly because of a poor ventilation system, and this specimen was moved to another, smaller, house.

 

The ironwork for this project was provided by Richard Turner and the initial construction was completed in 1852. The heat for the house was initially obtained by running a flue from the nearby Palm House but it was later equipped with its own boiler.

 

Ornamental buildings

 

The Pagoda

In the south-east corner of Kew Gardens stands the Great Pagoda (by Sir William Chambers), erected in 1762, from a design in imitation of the Chinese Ta. The lowest of the ten octagonal storeys is 15 m (49 ft) in diameter. From the base to the highest point is 50 m (164 ft).

 

Each storey finishes with a projecting roof, after the Chinese manner, originally covered with ceramic tiles and adorned with large dragons; a story is still propagated that they were made of gold and were reputedly sold by George IV to settle his debts. In fact the dragons were made of wood painted gold, and simply rotted away with the ravages of time. The walls of the building are composed of brick. The staircase, 253 steps, is in the centre of the building. The Pagoda was closed to the public for many years, but was reopened for the summer months of 2006 and is now open permanently. During the Second World War holes were cut in each floor to allow for drop-testing of model bombs.

  

The Japanese Gateway (Chokushi-Mon)

Built for the Japan-British Exhibition (1910) and moved to Kew in 1911, the Chokushi-Mon ("Imperial Envoy's Gateway") is a four-fifths scale replica of the karamon (gateway) of the Nishi Hongan-ji temple in Kyoto. It lies about 140 m west of the Pagoda and is surrounded by a reconstruction of a traditional Japanese garden.

  

The Minka House

Following the Japan 2001 festival, Kew acquired a Japanese wooden house called a minka. It was originally erected in around 1900 in a suburb of Okazaki. Japanese craftsmen reassembled the framework and British builders who had worked on the Globe Theatre added the mud wall panels.

 

Work on the house started on 7 May 2001 and, when the framework was completed on 21 May, a Japanese ceremony was held to mark what was considered an auspicious occasion. Work on the building of the house was completed in November 2001 but the internal artefacts were not all in place until 2006.

 

The Minka house is located within the bamboo collection in the west central part of the gardens.

  

Queen Charlotte's Cottage

Within the conservation area is a cottage that was given to Queen Charlotte as a wedding present on her marriage to George III. It has been restored by Historic Royal Palaces and is separately administered by them.

It is open to the public on weekends and bank holidays during the summer.

 

Kew Palace

Kew Palace is the smallest of the British royal palaces. It was built by Samuel Fortrey, a Dutch merchant in around 1631. It was later purchased by George III. The construction method is known as Flemish bond and involves laying the bricks with long and short sides alternating. This and the gabled front give the construction a Dutch appearance.

To the rear of the building is the "Queen's Garden" which includes a collection of plants believed to have medicinal qualities. Only plants that were extant in England by the 17th century are grown in the garden.

The building underwent significant restoration, with leading conservation architects Donald Insall Associates, before being reopened to the public in 2006.

It is administered separately from Kew Gardens, by Historic Royal Palaces.

In front of the palace is a sundial, which was given to Kew Gardens in 1959 to commemorate a royal visit. It was sculpted by Martin Holden and is based on an earlier sculpture by Thomas Tompion, a celebrated 17th century clockmaker.

 

Galleries and Museums

 

The Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanic Art

The Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanic Art opened in April 2008, and holds paintings from Kew's and Dr Shirley Sherwood's collections, many of which had never been displayed to the public before. It features paintings by artists such as Georg D. Ehret, the Bauer brothers, Pierre-Joseph Redouté and Walter Hood Fitch. The paintings and drawings are cycled on a six-monthly basis. The gallery is linked to the Marianne North Gallery (see above).

 

Near the Palm House is a building known as "Museum No. 1" (even though it is the only museum on the site), which was designed by Decimus Burton and opened in 1857. Housing Kew's economic botany collections including tools, ornaments, clothing, food and medicines, its aim was to illustrate human dependence on plants. The building was refurbished in 1998. The upper two floors are now an education centre and the ground floor houses the "Plants+People" exhibition which highlights the variety of plants and the ways that people use them.

 

Admission to the galleries and museum is free after paying admission to the gardens. The International Garden Photographer of the Year Exhibition is an annual event with an indoor display of entries during the summer months.

 

The Marianne North Gallery of Botanic Art

The Marianne North Gallery was built in the 1880s to house the paintings of Marianne North, an MP's daughter who travelled alone to North and South America, South Africa and many parts of Asia, at a time when women rarely did so, to paint plants. The gallery has 832 of her paintings. The paintings were left to Kew by the artist and a condition of the bequest is that the layout of the paintings in the gallery may not be altered.

 

The gallery had suffered considerable structural degradation since its creation and during a period from 2008 to 2009 major restoration and refurbishment took place, with works lead by with leading conservation architects Donald Insall Associates. During the time the gallery was closed the opportunity was also taken to restore the paintings to their original condition. The gallery reopened in October 2009.

 

The gallery originally opened in 1882 and is the only permanent exhibition in Great Britain dedicated to the work of one woman.

 

Plant collections

 

The plant collections include the Aquatic Garden, which is near the Jodrell laboratory. The Aquatic Garden, which celebrated its centenary in 2009, provides conditions for aquatic and marginal plants. The large central pool holds a selection of summer-flowering water lilies and the corner pools contain plants such as reed mace, bulrushes, phragmites and smaller floating aquatic species.

 

The Arboretum, which covers over half of the total area of the site, contains over 14,000 trees of many thousands of varieties. The Bonsai Collection is housed in a dedicated greenhouse near the Jodrell laboratory. The Cacti Collection is housed in and around the Princess of Wales Conservatory. The Carnivorous Plant collection is housed in the Princess of Wales Conservatory. The Grass Garden was created on its current site in the early 1980s to display ornamental and economic grasses; it was redesigned and replanted between 1994 and 1997. It is currently undergoing a further redesign and planting. Over 580 species of grasses are displayed.

 

The Herbaceous Grounds (Order Beds) were devised in the late 1860s by Sir Joseph Hooker, then director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, so that botany students could learn to recognise plants and experience at first hand the diversity of the plant kingdom. The collection is organised into family groups. Its name arose because plant families were known as natural orders in the 19th century. Over the main path is a rose pergola built in 1959 to mark the bicentennial of the Gardens. It supports climber and rambling roses selected for the length and profusion of flowering.

 

The Orchid Collection is housed in two climate zones within the Princess of Wales Conservatory. To maintain an interesting display the plants are changed regularly so that those on view are generally flowering. The Rock Garden, originally built of limestone in 1882, is now constructed of Sussex sandstone from West Hoathly, Sussex. The rock garden is divided into six geographic regions: Europe, Mediterranean and Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Asia, North America, and South America. There are currently 2,480 different "accessions" growing in the garden.

 

The Rose Garden, based upon original designs by William Nesfield, is behind the Palm House, and was replanted between 2009 and 2010 using the original design from 1848. It is intended as an ornamental display rather than a collection of a particularly large number of varieties. Other collections and specialist areas include the rhododendron dell, the azalea garden, the bamboo garden, the juniper collection, the berberis dell, the lilac garden, the magnolia collection, and the fern collection.

  

The Palm House and lake to Victoria Gate

The world's smallest water-lily, Nymphaea thermarum, was saved from extinction when it was grown from seed at Kew, in 2009.

 

Herbarium

The Kew herbarium is one of the largest in the world with approximately 7 million specimens used primarily for taxonomic study. The herbarium is rich in types for all regions of the world, especially the tropics.

 

Library and archives

The library and archives at Kew are one of the world's largest botanical collections, with over half a million items, including books, botanical illustrations, photographs, letters and manuscripts, periodicals, and maps. The Jodrell Library has been merged with the Economic Botany and Mycology Libraries and all are now housed in the Jodrell Laboratory.

 

Forensic horticulture

Kew provides advice and guidance to police forces around the world where plant material may provide important clues or evidence in cases. In one famous case the forensic science department at Kew were able to ascertain that the contents of the stomach of a headless corpse found in the river Thames contained a highly toxic African bean.

 

Economic Botany

 

The Sustainable Uses of Plants group (formerly the Centre for Economic Botany), focus on the uses of plants in the United Kingdom and the world's arid and semi-arid zones. The Centre is also responsible for curation of the Economic Botany Collection, which contains more than 90,000 botanical raw materials and ethnographic artefacts, some of which are on display in the Plants + People exhibit in Museum No. 1. The Centre is now located in the Jodrell Laboratory.

 

Jodrell Laboratory

The original Jodrell laboratory, named after Mr T. J. Phillips Jodrell who funded it, was established in 1877 and consisted of four research rooms and an office. Originally research was conducted into plant physiology but this was gradually superseded by botanical research. In 1934 an artists' studio and photographic darkroom were added, highlighting the importance of botanical illustration. In 1965, following increasing overcrowding, a new building was constructed and research expanded into seed collection for plant conservation. The biochemistry section also expanded to facilitate research into secondary compounds that could be derived from plants for medicinal purposes. In 1994 the centre was expanded again, tripling in size, and a decade later it was further expanded by the addition of the Wolfson Wing.

 

Kew Constabulary

Main article: Kew Constabulary

The gardens have their own police force, Kew Constabulary, which has been in operation since 1847. Formerly known as the Royal Botanic Gardens Constabulary, it is a small, specialised constabulary of two sergeants and 12 officers, who patrol the grounds in a green painted electric buggy. The Kew Constables are attested under section 3 of the Parks Regulation Act 1872, which gives them the same powers as the Metropolitan Police within the land belonging to the gardens.

 

Media

A number of films, documentaries and short videos have been made about Kew Gardens.

 

They include:

 

a short colour film World Garden by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth in 1942

three series of A Year at Kew (2007), filmed for BBC television and released on DVD

Cruickshank on Kew: The Garden That Changed the World, a 2009 BBC documentary, presented by Dan Cruickshank, exploring the history of the relationship between Kew Gardens and the British Empire

David Attenborough's 2012 Kingdom of Plants 3D

a 2003 episode of the Channel 4 TV series Time Team, presented by Tony Robinson, that searched for the remains of George III's palace

a 2004 episode of the BBC Four series Art of the Garden which looked at the building of the Great Palm House in the 1840s.

"Kew on a Plate", a TV programme showing the kinds of produce grown at Kew Gardens and how they can be prepared in a kitchen.

In 1921 Virginia Woolf published her short story "Kew Gardens", which gives brief descriptions of four groups of people as they pass by a flowerbed.

 

Access and transport

 

Elizabeth Gate

Kew Gardens is accessible by a number of gates. Currently, there are four gates into Kew Gardens that are open to the public: the Elizabeth Gate, which is situated at the west end of Kew Green, and was originally called the Main Gate before being renamed in 2012 to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II; the Brentford Gate, which faces the River Thames; the Victoria Gate (named after Queen Victoria), situated in Kew Road, which is also the location of the Visitors' Centre; and the Lion Gate, also situated in Kew Road.

 

Other gates that are not open to the public include Unicorn Gate, Cumberland Gate and Jodrell Gate (all in Kew Road) and Isleworth Gate (facing the Thames).

  

Victoria Gate

Kew Gardens station, a London Underground and National Rail station opened in 1869 and served by both the District line and the London Overground services on the North London Line, is the nearest train station to the gardens – only 400 metres (1,300 ft) along Lichfield Road from the Victoria Gate entrance. Built by the London and South Western Railway, the Historic England listed building is one of the few remaining original 19th-century stations on the North London Line, and the only station on the London Underground with a pub on the platform (though the platform entrance is now closed off). Kew Bridge station, on the other side of the Thames, 800 metres from the Elizabeth Gate entrance via Kew Bridge, is served by South West Trains from Clapham Junction and Waterloo.

 

London Buses route 65, between Ealing Broadway and Kingston, stops near the Lion Gate and Victoria Gate entrances; route 391, between Fulham and Richmond, stops near Kew Gardens station; while routes 237 and 267 stop at Kew Bridge station.

 

London River Services operate from Westminster during the summer, stopping at Kew Pier, 500 metres (1,600 ft) from Elizabeth Gate. Cycle racks are located just inside the Victoria Gate, Elizabeth Gate and Brentford Gate entrances. There is a 300-space car park outside Brentford Gate, reached via Ferry Lane, as well as some free, though restricted, on-street parking on Kew Road.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kew_Gardens

Managed to catch this majestic swan just after it had been dipping it's head underwater to feed.

 

Exposure 0.002 sec (1/500)

Aperture f/6.3

Focal Length 250 mm

ISO Speed 200

Exposure Bias 0 EV

Managed to get a copy of the newspaper !

Managed to get this done between changing nappies! Farish N gauge 47/7 given the weathering treatment.

Waddesdon Manor (NT) Bachelors Wing

 

Waddesdon Manor is a Grade 1 listed country house, managed by the Rothschild family on behalf of the National Trust.

 

The Grade I listed house was built in a mostly Neo-Renaissance style, copying individual features of several French châteaux, between 1874 and 1889 for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild as a weekend residence for entertaining and to house his collection of arts and antiquities. As the manor and estate have passed through three generations of the Rothschild family, the contents of the house have expanded to become one of the most rare and valuable collections in the world. In 1957, James de Rothschild bequeathed the house and its contents to the National Trust, in 2019 (pre-COVID) it attracted 463,000 visitors

 

In 1874, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild bought the Waddesdon agricultural estate from the Duke of Marlborough, at that time the Estate had no house, park or garden, with what was to become the site of the Manor house a bare hill.Over the following three years, the summit of the hill was levelled; the foundation stone for the house was laid in 1877, with the House finally redied in 1883.

 

Ferdinand de Rothschild had wanted a house in the style of the great Renaissance châteaux of the Loire Valley. He chose as his architect Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur, who had experiences of working on the restoration of many châteaux in that region, in particular that of the Château de Mouchy. Through Destailleur's vision, Waddesdon embodied an eclectic style based on the châteaux so admired by his patron, Baron Ferdinand. The towers at Waddesdon were based on those of the Château de Maintenon, and the twin staircase towers, on the north facade, were inspired by the staircase tower at the Château de Chambord. The structural design of Waddesdon was not entirely retrospective. Hidden from view were the most modern innovations of the late 19th century including a steel frame, which took the strain of walls on the upper floors, and which consequently permitted the layout of these floors to differ completely from the lower floors, the house also had hot and cold running water, central heating. After the Manors completion in 1883, Frederick decided it was to small, the Bachelors' Wing to the east was extended after 1885 and the Morning Room, built in late-Gothic style, was added to the west after 1888.

 

A major feature at Waddesdon are the vast wine cellars, They are modelled on the private cellars at Château Lafite Rothschild. More than 15,000 bottles are stored in the Cellars, some 150 years old, the majority from the Château Lafite Rothschild and Château Mouton Rothschild estates. It is the largest private collection of Rothschild wines in the world.

 

The gardens and landscape park were laid out by the French landscape architect Elie Lainé. Altogether, the creation of his garden cost £153,000, which (in terms of average wages then and in 2015) equates to £68.8 million

 

Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild also created a cast-iron aviary, inspired by 18th-century pavilions at the Palace of Versailles and Château de Chantilly, as well as his childhood home at Grüneburg. It was completed in 1889. Like other members of his family, Ferdinand was also keen animal lover. He stocked the aviary with exotic birds and enjoyed feeding them for his guests The aviary's paint and gilding were restored in 2003 and it now houses endangered species with a focus on breeding programmes. It is a registered zoo

 

Diolch yn fawr am 65,809,344 o olygfeydd anhygoel, mwynhewch ac arhoswch yn ddiogel

 

Thank you 65,809,344 amazing views, enjoy and stay safe

 

Shot 26.05.2018 at Waddesdon Manor (NT), Waddesdon, Bucks. Ref 134-120

    

Model: Vero Villares

Idea, photography, edition, MUA, hair, styling, etc: Carmen Carreño carmencarreno.es/

Managed to get out on the bike this afternoon and clocked a gentle 21 miles, and this bridge formed part of my route taking me from Lyneside to sandysike on the route of the old waverley railway line. Along this route you can still see old railway history - rails, Tin sheds, markers, sleepers etc.

It really does make a good cycle path nice and straight and fairly flat, this one is on the National Route 7 (NCN7) the part I am on is the Carlisle-Glasgow section.

Managed to make it to London Pride again, with my pal sisyphus007. This time I hired a Canon 85mm f/1.2L II lens, an absolute brick that was in itself a workout to carry round. Was perhaps a bit too ambitious in my determination to shoot with as wide an aperture as possible. When I hit the right focus point it was sharp, but I did find the focussing to be a little cumbersome.

 

As ever, the day was characterised by fun, happiness and laughter. The participants were, without fail, delighted to be photographed. Hopefully they all enjoyed the day !!

The Menominee River State Recreation Area is a state-managed protected area located in Breitung and Norway townships in Dickinson County and Faithorn Township in Menominee County, Michigan, southeast of Iron Mountain. It is 2,354 acres in area and is currently undeveloped. The park comprises a 145.35-acre tract along 1.5 miles of the Menominee River south of the City of Norway and the 2,208.83-acre Quiver Falls Tract along eight miles of the river farther downstream.

 

Information from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menominee_River_State_Recreation_Area

Managed to get the children to bed, leave my mum babysitting and sneak off for an hour or so. It was dull so I wasn't expecting a decent sunset but magically the clouds seem to lift a little revealing this fabulous redness!