Temple Of The Four Winds, Castle Howard.

The Tunnel of Love in Klevan, Ukraine.

Gustave Doré illustrations.

Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen - Perretta Frightens the Demon. Illustration for 'The Devil of Pope-Fig Island' by Jean de la Fontaine: Tales and Novels in Verse. Vol. 2 London 1896.

A View of Naples through a Window, 1824. Franz Ludwig Catel

Museum of Applied Arts (Ödön Lechner and Gyula Pártos, 1893-1896), Budapest, Hungary

“Święty Marcin / Saint Martin” Piotr Stachiewicz 1907

Yesterday I visited the Penates - the house of Russian painter Ilya Repin. It stands surrounded by pine forest, and the Bay of Finland is a 5 minute walk from the house.

The wooden house is very Russian style with little roofs and multiple terraces and enamel fireplaces in every room. There's a large studio on the second floor with large windows and skylights to allow as much natural light in as possible.

Repin was a very prolific painter and a huge name in his day, but also a bit of an eccentric. He always slept in a small unheated terrace, even through the winter. Him and his wife were vegetarian and practiced no-help dinner parties (with no servants at the door or the table). His weekly dinner parties on Wednesdays were attended by a multitude of artists, musicians, scientists. He was friends with Gorky, Mayakovsky, Chukovsky, Tolstoy, Yesenin etc. etc.

(Last picture: Ilya Repin paints opera singer Fyodor Shalyapin in his studio, 1914.)

La Scarzuola. The architecture is astonishing, I am in love