all about Paris' Belle Époque — or beautiful era ... Museum walls — and it's not all pretty pictures. In Edgar Degas' painting Women Ironing, the labor is hard. Hand laundering was big ...

This door-stop of a book weighing in at half a stone covers all the art aspects of that incredibly fertile, now lost world: painting, drawing, applied and decorative arts, architecture ...

Undeterred, I’ve come to Paris to unpack what I can of the belle époque — a golden age ... We stand in front of a towering oil painting of actress and courtesan Sarah Bernhardt reclined ...