Neville Walker’s ode to Vienna in this past weekend’s Financial Times is gorgeous and plaintive. Writing about Vienna in the newspaper’s “What I Love About…” series, Walker compellingly nails Vienna’s eccentric character.

Walker writes that Vienna was “once a cul-de-sac on the edge of the Eastern Bloc” now “learning to be hip and modern.” Yet what makes the city so interesting is not its uneven emergence into contemporary European cool but rather its vestigal otherworldliness. Walker knows this; by singling out the Kettenbrückengasse flea market and Peter’s Operncafé Hartauer as emblems of today’s Vienna, he gets at a city that is not so much resting on its laurels as much as it is holding the uncanny tight, as if it were a lifevest. Or, in Walker’s words: “Vienna is like an estranged relative grown eccentric by living alone, but suddenly seized with enthusiasm for a newly-expanded social circle.”

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One of our favorite art writers, Jackie Wullschlager, delivers the goods in her column in today’s Financial Times. Today’s subject: “Renoir Landscapes,” an exhibit currently showing at London’s National Gallery.

The highly recognized master Impressionist painter is a household name, of course, and his paintings are widely reproduced. The exhibition of 70-odd works on display at the National Gallery consists of lesser-known, privately-owned landscapes that display settings and color palettes at odds with the best-known of Renoir’s works.

Reflecting on the collection, Wullschlager writes: “To speak of an unknown Renoir is to risk paradox, but this show delivers precisely that.”

It’s phrasings like this one that make us swoon, Jackie.

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