I'm having a little trouble deciding how much sketching I want to so and how much time I want to spend seeing the sights. Yesterday I got out pretty briskly and sketched in the neighborhood since I had to take the cat to a vet appointment at 11:00.

Above is the town hall of the neighborhood I'm in, and it's the building where my hosts got married.

After the vet trip it was quite cloudy, so I went to the Louvre instead. It's overwhelmingly large. I was there for hours, was picky about the paintings I spent time with, and I still didn't quite make it through all of just the Dutch paintings. I'm going to have to do it in chunks.

Above is the page of sketches I did while I was there. I loved seeing the young, cocky, ambitious self portrait of Rembrandt next to the older one just in his regular painting gear and really owning his identity as a painter.

The other sketches are of small oils done by Peder Balke, a Norweigan artist commissioned to follow the footsteps of a previous expedition and paint the landscapes. What a cool job to get! I was charmed by the series. It was a good, if overwhelming, day.