Place Pigalle: The Models' Fountain & the Nouvelle Athènes

Why is it significant?

Stand by the round fountain in the middle of Place Pigalle and let the traffic swirl around you. Neon signs, nightclubs and tour buses line the boulevard, and the hill of Montmartre rises behind the rooftops to the north. It looks like a place for the night.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand by the round fountain in the middle of Place Pigalle and let the traffic swirl around you. Neon signs, nightclubs and tour buses line the boulevard, and the hill of Montmartre rises behind the rooftops to the north. It looks like a place for the night. But a hundred and fifty years ago, this little square was one of the busiest job markets in the art world.

In the nineteenth century the streets between here and the old city were full of painters' studios, and models came to this fountain every morning to be hired, many of them young Italians from poor mountain villages, posing as saints, shepherds or Roman heroes for a day's wage. A painter needing a Madonna or a bandit simply walked across the square and chose one. The square itself is named after Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, an eighteenth-century sculptor, so art was in its name long before the cabarets.

On the corner of the square stood the café of the Nouvelle Athènes, the New Athens, named after this whole romantic quarter of artists below the hill. In the 1870s it became the headquarters of the Impressionists. Édouard Manet held court at a corner table, Edgar Degas argued with everyone, and young painters came to listen. Degas set one of his most famous pictures inside it: In a Café, often called The Absinthe Drinker, with the actress Ellen Andrée slumped in silence before a glass of green liquor. When it was shown in London in 1893, the critics were scandalised by so much gloom in so small a frame.

Just to the east along the boulevard stood the Cirque Fernando, later the Cirque Medrano, a circus that Paris painters adored. Renoir painted two little acrobat girls there, Degas painted Miss La La hanging from the roof by her teeth, and Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat painted its horses and riders. And in 1881, on the same boulevard, Rodolphe Salis opened the Chat Noir, the Black Cat, often called the first modern cabaret, where poets, singers and shadow-puppet shows filled the night.

So the painters, the models and the night people all arrived here together, and they have never quite left. Now cross the boulevard and climb the steep little rue Houdon, uphill from the square, then follow rue des Abbesses to a small square with a metro entrance that looks like a giant dragonfly.