Musée de Montmartre: Renoir's Garden & Valadon's Studio

Why is it significant?

Walk into the courtyard at number 12 rue Cortot and suddenly you are in the countryside: a long, low house with shutters, old trees, and gardens running down the slope towards a vineyard.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk into the courtyard at number 12 rue Cortot and suddenly you are in the countryside: a long, low house with shutters, old trees, and gardens running down the slope towards a vineyard. This is the oldest house on Montmartre, built in the seventeenth century, and since 1960 it has been the Musée de Montmartre.

One of its early owners was an actor known on stage as Rosimond, who took over many of Molière's roles after the playwright's death and bought the house in 1680. Two centuries later it had been cut up into cheap studios and lodgings for artists. In 1876 Pierre-Auguste Renoir rented rooms here, with a shed in the garden for his canvases. Under these trees he painted The Swing, sunlight dappling a young woman's dress, and from here, a friend remembered, they carried his enormous canvas down the street to paint the dancers at the Moulin de la Galette.

Then came Suzanne Valadon. Born poor, she was working in a circus until, by her own account, a fall from a trapeze ended that career, and she became the model every painter wanted: she is the dancer in Renoir's Dance at Bougival, and Toulouse-Lautrec painted her too. But she watched them work, and taught herself to draw. Degas bought her drawings and encouraged her, and in 1894 she became the first woman admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She painted women's bodies as women know them, solid, real and unflattered, long before that was fashionable.

From 1912 to 1926 she lived and worked here with her son, the painter Maurice Utrillo, and her lover André Utter, who was younger than her son. Montmartre nicknamed them the cursed trinity. Utrillo, fragile and an alcoholic since his teens, painted the white walls and empty streets of Montmartre over and over, sometimes from postcards, and in his lifetime became more famous than his mother. Their studio has been restored, with its stove and easels, so you can stand where they stood.

Look over the garden wall and you will see the vines of the Clos Montmartre falling away below; you will reach them soon. First, continue along rue Cortot to rue des Saules, turn left, then left again along rue Norvins, and follow the noise of the crowds to the busiest square on the hill.