Dali House

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) lived and sculpted at 54 Rue de Montparnasse. The Romanian had been a studio assistant to Auguste Rodin but ventured far into stylisation with such breathtaking works as “Bird in Space”, which US Customs would only admit as an industrial item (a propeller, officials thought), not art. The case went to trial: It was art.

He’s buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, where you can also see several statues he made for fellow artists who committed suicide, among them “The Kiss”.

Quite a character, Brancusi, mostly blue. Tsuguharu (often called Leonard) Foujita (1886-1968) was another character, but mostly red.

His first studio was at 5 Rue Delambre, initially the apartment of his wife Fernande Barrey, and from there he became an exceedingly popular artist in the 1920s, even winning the Order of Belgium and Legion of Honour.

Born into Japan’s Samurai class, he came to Paris in 1913 and quickly befriended Ortiz de Zarate, Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Juan Gris.

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His apartment and studio here had a bathtub with running water, a magnet for models, as was the flamboyantly dressed Foujita. Seen here is his “Little Cavalier”.

When he hit the big time he moved to a luxurious apartment at 3 Square Montsouris that he shared with Lucie Badoul, the model he’d left his wife for, and whom he renamed Youki (Rose-Snow), buying her a chauffeur-driven yellow car for her 21st birthday.

This is “The Cafe”. Foujita was one of the few Parisian artists of the time who made a fortune. His famous portrait of Man Ray’s lover Kiki, “Reclining Nude with Toile de Jouy”, sold for 8,000 francs after it caused a sensation at the 1922 Salon d’Automne. Foujita had exhibitions in Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, London, New York and Chicago, and until 1939 a studio in the US.

Man Ray’s finest hour came at his studio at 8 Rue Val-de-Grace, where he had a distant view of the domed observatory. You can see on the horizon it in his 1936 photographic artwork “A l’heure de l’observatoire – Les Amants” (”Observatory Time – The Lovers”), with the lips of photojournalist Lee Miller, his lover and muse, floating above it.

The tour wraps up, as life’s tours often do, in a cemetery, this time the famous Pere Lachaise. Here with Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein, among many other notables of the art world, lies Honore Daumier (1808-1879).

Daumier, painter as well as draftsman, printer and publisher, achieved fame and notoriety for his satirical cartoons and caricatures in the newspapers, but in his lifetime no one ever showed interest in his paintings. He died blind and poor.

Emperor Louis-Philippe threw him in jail for six months in 1832 for an unflattering portrayal in La Caricature, and the weekly was forced to close three years later for incurring further umbrage, at which point Daumier joined Le Charivari, where he ridiculed the bourgeoisie and the justice system and championed the underprivileged.

His 4,000 lithographs and hundreds of oils, watercolours, sculptures and drawings comprise the largest legacy of any artist before 1900. Above, “The Studio”.

Fittingly close to Daumier is interred Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875).

Corot hung up his home-decorator’s shingle at age 26 to get serious about art and quickly became one of the most naturalistic of landscape painters, travelling around Europe sketching from nature, taking to heart his teacher’s command “to reproduce as scrupulously as possible what I saw in front of me”.

Late in his career Corot created figure paintings of high quality, which Edgar Degas praised, but his directness of vision in his landscapes is what primarily influenced younger artists, Picasso among them. In his final decade he was called “Père Corot”. “There is only one master here – Corot,” Claude Monet said. “We are nothing compared to him, nothing.” Below is “The Windmill”.

As a man of means he was generous. In 1871 when Paris was under siege by the Prussians, he donated the equivalent of £2,000 to the city’s poor. The following year he bought a cottage in Auvers as a gift for Honoré Daumier, who by then was blind and destitute. In 1875 he donated 10,000 francs to the widow of Millet. He also financially supported a daycare centre in Paris.

Amadeo Modigliani was 33 years old, emaciated by tubercular meningitis and almost literally dead drunk when he was found unconscious on an ice-covered street and was taken to hospital, where he died on January 22, 1919.

His brother held high rank in the Italian government and sent word to “bury him like a prince”. His hearse was followed here by thousands of friends and admirers, traffic police offering a military salute.

In the meantime his pregnant wife Jeanne Hebuterne threw herself from her parents’ fifth-floor apartment. She and her unborn child were originally buried elsewhere, but common sense eventually prevailed and she now rests here beside her “Modi”.

Georges Seurat (1859-1891) was only 31 when he died of diptheria. He was the supreme artist as scientist, and gave emotion to his science. His study of colour gave birth to neo-impressionism and, most magically, pointillism, through which tiny dots merged into one of the world’s best-loved paintings, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte”, first shown in 1886.

Gustave Caillebotte (1848-94) was one of the most confidently productive of the impressionists, if perhaps the least talented. Without him they would have had a far longer road to acceptance.

Born to upper-class comfort on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and raised on Rue de Miromesnil, he was licensed to practise law but took to art instead, and he shared his finances with Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and others.

He died at his home, Petit Gennevilliers on the Seine near Argenteuil, of pulmonary congestion, just 46. His considerable art collection was bequeated to a disinterested government on condition that it be displayed in the Luxembourg Palace and the Louvre. Renoir, his executor, had to negotiate a partial settlement – the state wasn’t interested in impressionism.

In 2000 Caillebotte’s “L’Homme au balcon, boulevard Haussmann” sold for $14.3 million, vengeance, one might say, for a man whose work was always the last among the impressionists to find a buyer.

Devoted to sarcasm and the absurd, Max Ernst (1891-1976) – dadaist, surrealist and inventor of frottage, grattage and a half-human, half-bird called Loplop – spent much of his later life in Sedona, Arizona, but in 1953 returned to Paris, where he’d first moved from his native Germany 31 years earlier.

This is “The Elephant Celebes”.

The surrealist poet Paul Éluard (1895-1952) was born Eugène Grindel in nearby Saint-Denis. He joined the surrealists, then discovered the French Communist Party, for which he eulogised Stalin. Did the surrealists dump him in dismay, or did he quit the surrealists when Dalí ran off with his first wife Gala? This is Dalí’s portrait of Paul.

Born in the Virgin Islands, Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) didn’t make it to Paris until 1852 but, studying alongside Monet, Cézanne and Armand Guillaumin, was soon steeped in the artistic milieu. He and Monet fled to London during the Franco-Prussian War, and when Pissarro returned and moved to Pontoise, he created numerous magnificent paintings of the French countryside and lured the other impressionists for visits.

In his last years, divided between Paris, Rouen and his final home in Eragny, he began to achieve a modicum of critical favour.

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) may have been the son of the great diplomat Charles Talleyrand. His father of record, the cabinet minister Charles Delacroix, was supposedly infertile.

Eugène was obviously of a different generation than the impressionists, but in his expressive strokes and colourful use of optical effects they found a place to begin.

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