Elizabeth Peyton - Volume 5, 2009-2014 - Dark Incandescence (Relié)

Around the time that this volume begins, in late 2009, Elizabeth Peyton was re-reading Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, as well as the collected travel notes and letters from Flaubert's journey to Egypt and the Middle East from 1849 to 1851. Flaubert's travel writings are full of caustic social observation, lively characterizations of the people he encountered, and vivid painterly descriptions of the landscapes around him and, as such, area precursor to the precision with which he sketched out provincial French life in Madame Bovary.
"The two years in the East had been a purge, so to speak, of Flaubert's romantic longings," writes Francis Steegmuller, editor of the travel writings, "of his lusts after exoticism in all its forms, of his need for brilliant colour, heat, violence, grandeur, and filth. Now with those boiling desires drawn off—at least for the moment—he had for the first time in his life the courage to concern himself with the details of daily existence in a small French town, which he saw with new eyes.
Never before could he have endured the-company of the Bovarys ! " — Kirsty Bell