Owning It
Page 26
20 rue du Rambuteau
La Maison du Pastel
La Maison du Pastel is the oldest pastel manufacturer in the world. Founded in the eighteenth century by Henri Roche, who sold his “pigment sticks” to artists like Maurice Quentin de La Tour and Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin. In the nineteenth century, Degas purchased his pastels at La Maison du Pastel, including the ultramarines he used in his Blue Dancers and the vert vif he used in The Green Singer.
49 rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Pissaro home and studio
The Danish-French impressionist and post-impressionist painter Camille Pissaro lived and worked at 49 rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette before moving with his family outside of Paris to Pontoise and Louveciennes. Cool little factoid: rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette was named after the women who lived around that street. A lorette was a loose woman.
8 rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Home and atelier of Eugène Delacroix
Eugène Delacroix lived and worked at 8 rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette from 1844 until 1857. Sadly, Eugène’s home was destroyed to make room for a Carrefour, a chain supermarket.
56 rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Birthplace of Paul Gauguin
On June 7, 1848, Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was born at 56 rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette to Clovis Gauguin, a journalist, and Alina Maria Chazal, the daughter of a socialist leader and radical feminist. Today 56 rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette is home to a Middle Eastern restaurant.
8 rue Carcel
Gauguin’s space
In 1881, Gauguin lived at 8 rue Carcel with his wife and four children. It was here that he painted one of his most famous paintings, a dark, moody piece depicting a cozy room in his home, complete with a still life of flowers and his wife playing an upright piano.
11 boulevard de Clichy
Pablo Picasso’s posh pad
In 1909, after Picasso graduated from struggling artist to painter with some serious cash to splash, he moved from a dreary apartment in the hills of Montmartre to this light-filled studio-apartment combo with a view of Sacré Cœur.
82 boulevard de Clichy
Moulin Rouge
The Moulin Rouge, perhaps the world’s most famous cabaret, opened its doors in 1889. With a swish of their ruffled skirts and a kick of their shapely legs, pretty young dancing girls would delight (and inspire) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Charles Conder, and Edgar Degas. Back then, the cabaret was dark and slightly seedy. Toulouse-Lautrec developed a friendship with one of the dancers, a slender, mentally ill girl named Jane Avril, and featured her in many of his works.
16 rue du Repos
Père Lachaise Cemetery
This cemetery is positively crowded with the headstones of famous corpses—Molière, Chopin, Wilde, Maupassant, Morrison. One grave, its headstone faded and crowded between encroaching neighbors, belongs to Jane Avril, the Moulin Rouge cancan dancer immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec. After entrancing the artist with her high kicks and skirt tosses, she married a faithless German artist and died in poverty.
17 rue Jean-Baptiste Pigalle
Jean-Baptiste Pigalle home
From 1756 to 1782, the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle lived and worked in a modest limestone building on this road, later named after him. Today the building houses a super-swank upholsterer and interior decorator.
18 boulevard Pigalle (aka boulevard de Clichy)
Whistler’s whore
American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted a portrait of Joanna Hiffernan, an Irish painter and artists’ model, here in the winter of 1861–1862. Whistler and Hiffernan spent days cloistered away in his warm, cozy studio, which suited them just fine since they were already in the midst of a scandalous love affair (Whistler’s puritanical family didn’t approve of the relationship because Hiffernan posed nude for various artists, which, in their eyes, meant she had to be a whore). One of Whistler’s portraits of Hiffernan, The White Girl, is now housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
3 rue Royale
Maxim’s
This fashionable restaurant was the gathering place for luminaries of the Belle Époque, particularly artists and writers. Jean Cocteau frequented the opulent art nouveau restaurant, where he would dine on boeuf braisée bourgeoise and admire the beautiful female patrons.
22 rue des Saules
Lapin Agile
Long before Picasso immortalized this cabaret with his painting At the Lapin Agile, it had a reputation for attracting the sketchiest members of society—pimps, criminals, indigents, anarchists, and struggling artists. The volatile Italian painter and sculpture Amedeo Clemente Modigliani lived nearby in Le Bateau-Lavoir, a commune for penniless artists. Lapin Agile is where he would consume absinthe, smoke hashish, and dally with prostitutes.
13 place Emile-Goudeau
Le Bateau-Lavoir
7 place Jean-Baptiste Clément
Modigliani’s heads
The hotheaded Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani lived and worked at both of these locations. Some nights, under the cover of darkness, he would slip silently through the streets until he came to the Barbès-Rochechouart Metro station, which was under construction. He stole railroad ties, dragging them back to his dingy studio, where he would use them to sculpt human heads. Modigliani suffered from tuberculosis and used drugs and alcohol, especially the wicked wormwood, to ease his pain. At his home on place Jean-Baptiste Clément, he would get totally liquored up and then get into loud, knock-down, drag-out brawls with his girlfriends, Beatrice Hastings and Jeanne Hébuterne.
44 rue Pointe Cadet
Hôpital de la Charité
In this dreary, gray-brick building, on January 24, 1920, Modigliani took his last breath, his body totes wasted from tubercular meningitis and the excessive consumption of alcohol. A few days later, his young pregnant lover, devastated with grief, would take a leap from a five-story building.
6 rue Lucien Gaulard
Cimetière Saint-Vincent
This is the final resting place of Maurice Utrillo, a French-born artist famous for his Parisian cityscapes and excessive drinking. In life, Utrillo hung at the seedy Lapin Agile with Modigliani and writer Guillaume Apollinaire. In death, he hangs at this cemetery, conveniently located across the street from the Lapin Agile, along with French author and playwright Marcel Aymé and director Marcel Carné. Tourists can’t visit Montmartre without seeing at least one of Utrillo’s paintings, which are prodigiously reproduced in postcard form.
20 rue Visconti
Atelier of Frédéric Bazille
In 1867, the wealthy artist Frédéric Bazille invited his impoverished friends Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet to bunk at his atelier. It was in this studio that Bazille and Renoir painted each other’s portraits; today the two portraits hang in the Musée d’Orsay.
7 rue de Guichard
Berthe and her birds
In 1873, Berthe Morisot moved to an apartment in a bourgeois, four-story apartment building at 7 rue de Guichard. Although Morisot was an extremely talented painter and one of the founding members of the school of impressionism, she lived and worked in the bedroom of her light, humble apartment. A visitor at the time described her studio as having white slipcovers and curtains, hooks holding straw shepherdess hats, and a cage filled with chirping parakeets.
37 rue Vaneau
Galerie Minsky
Argentinian surrealist painter Leonor Fini is often described as the bohemian “it girl” of Paris. Most people haven’t heard of her, but in the early half of the twentieth century she dominated the Parisian art scene, ran with Picasso and Dalí, and conquered more men than Napoleon. The prolific artist, party girl, and lover would often hold wild raves at her house here at 37 rue Vaneau.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LEAH MARIE BROWN has worked as a journalist and photographer. An avid traveler, she has had adventures and mishaps from Paris to Tokyo. She doesn’t buy cheesy T-shirts or useless bric-a-brac, but prefers friendships and memories as souvenirs from her travels. She lives a bike ride away from the white sand beaches of Florida’s Emerald Coast with her husband, children, and pampered poodles. She is hard at work on the next novel in the It Girls series, but loves to hear from readers. Please visit her website at www.leahmariebrown.com. You can also visit her blogs: leahmariebrownhistoricals.blogspot.com and leahmariebrown.blogspot.com, and follow her on Twitter @18thCFrance and @leahmariebrown.
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