Dali House

The Auberge de la Bonne Franquette at the corner of Rue des Saules and Rue Saint Rustique was called Aux Billards en Bois in the 1890s, when Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Monet and Zola were among the clientele. The owners still take pride in the fact that Van Gogh painted its garden in “La Guinguette” in 1886.

At the Montmartre Museum at 12 Rue Cortot there are art exhibits, musical performances and many valuable documents, but no visitor can ignore the fact that this 17th-house was the home at different times of Renoir, Raoul Dufy, Erik Satie and Emile Bernard, and then a café that provided lodgings for Maurice Utrillo and his mum.

The main house is the “maison de Rosimond”, so named for its one-time owner, Rose de Rosimond, a stage actress in Molière’s troupe who died onstage in mid-scene, just as Molière had done. Not much to look at out front, but it has a lovely garden in the back.

The Brasserie des Martyrs, once situated at 75 Rue des Martyrs, was the place to be seen in the days of Courbet, Baudelaire, Proudhon and Gauthier, and remained so for the generations that followed.

The great Renoir – whose “Seated Female Nude”, also known as “After the Bath”, is seen here – was among those who had their own designated tables in the huge, three-storey restaurant. Monet and Pissarro would hover around his, trying to muster the courage to speak to him.

Edgar Degas never ventured far from the Montmartre area his whole life. At 6 Boulevard de Clichy he spent the last five years, dying in 1917, lonesome and blind, the dizzying lights of the stage and the exciting motion of the racetrack lost to him forever.

He was still sculpting in 1910, when the extraordinary “snapshot” here was taken of him waiting for a tram on the boulevard, but he had to stop working by 1912 because of his failing eyesight. In his final years he would aimlessly wander the streets.

Degas had lived on Rue Victor-Massé for a quarter century until his apartment building was marked for demolition. His friend, model and fellow painter Suzanne Valadon (Utrillo’s mother) suggested this place, among the clouds of gypsum dust from the miners’ carts and the wheat dust from the nearby windmills, which gave Place Blanche its name.

At #9 Place Pigalle was the café Nouvelle Athènes, where Degas painted his famous “Absinthe” (detail below), the actress Ellen Andrée and painter Marcellin Desboutin populating what has become a visual metaphor for bohemianism (though the latter is having a coffee).

The popular Desboutin was among the first artists to shift here from the Café Guerbois, with its rambunctious pool players. Matisse, Manet and Van Gogh were among those who preferred the relative peace and quiet at the Athènes.

The quiet didn’t last. In the 1940s it became a strip club called the Sphynx, frequented by Nazis and then the liberation troops. In the 1980s and ’90s it was the New Moon, with live rock bands. In 2004 it was knocked down.

Édouard Manet was the big promoter for the Café Guerbois at 9 Avenue de Clichy. He sold paintings, art equipment and furniture from #11 next door and had a pair of tables reserved at the bistro every Friday night. Sisley, Bazille and Renoir were among those who became regulars, as did Paul Cézanne, as previously placemarked.

It was here that Cézanne famously called Degas “an asshole looking like a notary”. When Degas replied equally cuttingly that “the police would do a good job to arrest anyone who copied nature in painting without intelligence”, a brawl erupted. Then Manet took scissors to Degas’ painting of Manet’s wife, saying he’d made her look ugly. Emile Zola, pictured here, played referee.

This is Manet territory. The atelier of Édouard Manet (1832-83) was at 51 Rue de Saint-Petersbourg in the 1860s and ’70s while he was living down the road at #4 with Suzanne Leenhoff, the Dutchwoman who started out as his piano teacher and ended up the mother of his son. As a teenager the boy was always introduced in public as Suzanne’s brother, until Manet inherited money in 1863 and they finally married.

In 1874 Manet showed his painting “Le Chemin de Fer (The Railroad)” at the Paris Salon, a now-famous scene of a woman pausing in her reading as a young girl peers through a railing at the steaming Saint-Lazare railway yard. It was painted from the backyard of a friend’s house on the nearby rue de Rome.

Manet long bore the scars of public outrage over “Olympia”, shown at the Paris Salon of 1865, and it wasn’t until 1871 that he began to be appreciated. He always regarded “Olympia” as his best work and kept it until he died – from syphilis, just down the street at #39. It failed to sell at auction and John Singer Sargent finally raised public funds to buy it for the Louvre in 1888.

The gare Saint-Lazare represented modern, industrialising France to a generation of artists, “capitalism triumphant”, as one put it. Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) included himself among the strollers admiring the new marvel in “The Bridge of Europe”, from 1876, seen here.

Born into wealth, Caillebotte showed his works at the impressionist exhibitions right from the beginning in 1876, in fact serving as the shows’ chief organiser, promoter and financial backer and personally buying works by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne, Degas, Sisley and Morisot. This is a detail from Caillebotte’s best-known work, “Paris Street in Rainy Weather”.

Paris’ busiest train station, the Gare Saint-Lazare, was brand new – “a cathedral of the new humanity”, as Theophile Gauthier put it – when Claude Monet and a slew of other painters sought to capture its light and movement on canvas.

Monet’s 1877 series of seven paintings of the station (he returned later to do four more) are a study in the varying effects of weather and lighting, the latter filtered through the station’s wrought-iron ceiling, which was designed by Gustave Eiffel.

For many artists, the station was also crucially their departure point for train rides to the countryside, where more inspiration awaited.

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) rented Room 404 at the Hotel Garnier in 1893. He had a good view of the Place du Havre and painted the busy crossroads in the rain, developing his impressionist technique with studies of the same scene in varying conditions.

Few patrons were interested in experimentation, and Pissarro remained so poor that he couldn’t afford the public trams, so he walked everywhere, a canvas stuck under one arm. Seen here is his “The Boulevard Montmartre on a Cloudy Morning”, from 1897.

In 1898 Pissarro stood in a window of the Grand Hôtel du Louvre and painted pictures of the horse-drawn double-decker buses plying the Place du Théatre Francais. You can see his work in the lobby, and Kirk Douglas recalled Pissarro’s effort in 1984, standing in the very same window, in a speech to open an art exhibition held at the hotel.

The four-star hotel remains very much a going concern. It opened on the Rue de Rivoli in a building that had been erected at Baron Haussmann’s urging in time for the 1852 World’s Fair. The Pereire brothers ran a famous department storie from its ground floor, then in 1875 purchased the whole building to expand and moved the hotel here, on the other side of the Place du Palais-Royal.

This is a detail from Manet’s “Portrait of Zola”. It’s been suggested that someone whom Emile Zola (1840-1902) famously “accused” took their revenge by stopping up the chimey at his home at 21 Rue de Bruxelles on September 29, 1902. He died of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

Still welcoming visitors, L’atelier Eugène Delacroix at 6 Rue de Furstemberg was where he moved in 1857 and built a studio in the garden. The bedroom has furniture and other items he brought from Morocco in 1832.

The leading French romantic painter, Delacroix (1798-1863) came a generation before the other artists on this tour. His famous painting of the 1830 Paris Uprising, “Liberty Leading the People”, shows Notre Dame Cathedral in the background.

La Ruche – the beehive – was a buzzing nest of artists as far back as 1900, many of them initially Russian emigres, joined later by Constantin Brancusi, Jacques Lifshitz, Jacob Epstein, Jules Pascin, Moise Kissling and Marc Chagall. Leon Trotsky supposedly once stayed here as well. It’s not open to the public.

The sculptor Ossip Zadkine called La Ruche “a sinister wheel of Brie”, its slices divided up as studios for a motley menu of creativity.

The Russian expressionist Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), seen here in a portrait by Amedeo Modigliani, lived at La Ruche from 1911 to 1916, honing his painting skills while toiling at various labourers’ jobs. From a nearby slaughterhouse at La Villette he once brought home a large carcass to paint over the course of several smelly days, dousing it with fresh blood to maintain the colours.

Health officials were summoned. He gave them a lecture on life’s priorities. They probably couldn’t see his point, but earlier this year “Carcass of Beef” sold for £7.8 million to an anonymous buyer.

Ooph, as they say in France when ordering an egg. Let’s get washed up before we continue the tour.