Textual description of firstImageUrl

Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) | 179 artworks | Part.³

Auguste Rodin🎨 in: Camille Mauclair (1905).
Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, p. 65-67.
'Europe' in anything other than the geographical sense is a wholly artificial construct. It makes no sense at all to lump together Beethoven🎨 and Debussy🎨, Voltaire and Burke, Vermeer and Picasso, Notre Dame and St Paul's, boiled beef and bouillabaisse, and portray them as elements of a 'European' musical, philosophical, artistic, architectural or gastronomic reality. If Europe charms us, as it has so often charmed me, it is precisely because of its contrasts and contradictions, not its coherence and continuity.