Painters, Windmills and Cancan: Montmartre, the Artists' Hill of Paris

From the Wall of I Love Yous to the red sails of the Moulin Rouge: the laundry boat where Picasso invented Cubism, Renoir's garden, Valadon's studio, Van Gogh's flat and the last windmills of Paris

Paris · 12 stops · 32 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Place Pigalle: The Models' Fountain & the Nouvelle Athènes

   Place Pigalle, 75009 Paris, France

   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.

2. 2. Place des Abbesses: Guimard's Metro & the Wall of I Love Yous

   Place des Abbesses, 75018 Paris, France

   Before you climb any higher, look at the metro entrance in the middle of the square. A fan of glass spreads over the stairs like the wing of a dragonfly, held up by green cast-iron stalks that curl like young plant shoots, and above it the word Métropolitain is written in letters that seem to be melting in the sun.

   This is the work of Hector Guimard, the architect who dressed the first Paris metro in Art Nouveau around 1900. Plenty of people at the time found his entrances bizarre and hard to read, and over the decades many of them were torn down. Only two of his original glass-roofed pavilions survive in Paris, and this is one of them. It was moved here from the Hôtel de Ville station in 1974.

   Now step into the little garden on the side of the square, Square Jehan-Rictus. On its back wall, a dark blue surface of six hundred and twelve tiles of enamelled lava carries the words I love you, again and again, in some two hundred and fifty languages. The Wall of I Love Yous was created in 2000 by Frédéric Baron, who had spent years asking neighbours and strangers to write the phrase in their own tongue, and by the calligrapher Claire Kito. Look for the red flecks scattered across the blue: they stand for the pieces of a broken heart... which the wall, in its own way, puts back together.

   The name of the square remembers women who ruled this hill for more than six centuries. In 1133 King Louis the Sixth and his queen, Adelaide, founded a royal abbey of Benedictine nuns on Montmartre, and its abbesses owned vines, mills and quarries all over the slope. The Revolution closed the abbey, and in 1794 the last abbess, Marie-Louise de Montmorency-Laval, old, deaf and nearly blind, was sent to the guillotine. Across the square, the brick church of Saint-Jean de Montmartre was a quiet revolution of its own: finished in 1904, it was one of the very first churches built in reinforced concrete, and work stopped for years while officials argued about whether it would stand.

   Take rue Ravignan, the steep street climbing out of the top of the square, and stop at the little sloping plaza with a green drinking fountain. That is where modern art moved in.

3. 3. Le Bateau-Lavoir: The Laundry Boat Where Cubism Was Born

   13 Rue Ravignan, Place Émile-Goudeau, 75018 Paris, France

   Find the green Wallace fountain on this tilted little square, then look at the low, plain façade at number 13, its windows filled with old black-and-white photographs. It looks like almost nothing. But behind it the building drops down the slope for several storeys... and in one of its cold, cramped studios, the art of the twentieth century was turned inside out.

   The poet Max Jacob is usually credited with the nickname Bateau-Lavoir, the laundry boat, because the old wooden building creaked and swayed like the washing barges moored on the Seine. It was freezing in winter and stifling in summer, and the story goes that the whole house shared a single water tap. Pablo Picasso moved in in 1904, twenty-two years old and broke, and stayed until 1909. Here the Blue Period gave way to the Rose Period, and here he met Fernande Olivier, who became his companion and his model.

   In 1907, in this building, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: five naked women with faces like masks, broken into sharp, angular planes, staring straight out at the viewer. His friends were baffled. Matisse is said to have taken it as a mockery, and Braque reportedly compared looking at it to drinking petrol. The canvas stayed in the studio, barely seen, for years. Today it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it is often called the starting point of Cubism.

   The house was full of other talents too. The painters Juan Gris and Kees van Dongen had studios here, and the poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire were always around. In 1908 Picasso threw a famous banquet here for Henri Rousseau, the self-taught former customs clerk whom most critics laughed at. It was half homage and half prank, and nobody has ever agreed which half mattered more. Rousseau, the story goes, sat on a throne of chairs and played his violin, while wax from a lantern dripped onto his head and he never noticed.

   The original building burned down in May 1970, just as it was about to be restored. What you see is a reconstruction from 1978, and behind the façade there are still studios for working artists. From here, follow the little streets east along the side of the hill, until a cluster of white domes rises above the rooftops.

4. 4. Sacré-Cœur: The White Basilica on the Hill of the Commune

   35 Rue du Chevalier de la Barre, 75018 Paris, France

   Stand on the terrace in front of the basilica and, for a moment, turn your back on it. The whole of Paris lies at your feet, grey roofs and chimney pots rolling away to the horizon, the Eiffel Tower poking up in the distance. Now turn around... and face the whitest building in the city.

   It stays that white for a reason. The stone is a travertine from Château-Landon, southeast of Paris, which releases calcite when it rains. Every shower washes it, and soot and pollution never quite manage to stick. The architect, Paul Abadie, won the competition with this Romano-Byzantine design of domes, and plenty of Parisians mocked it. Writers compared it to a wedding cake, and worse.

   To understand why it was built, go back to 1871. France had just been crushed by Prussia, and on the morning of 18 March troops were sent up this very hill to take away cannons that Parisians had paid for themselves. The crowd stopped them, two generals were shot in a garden a few streets away, and the uprising of the Paris Commune began. For devout Catholics, defeat and revolt were a punishment for the nation's sins. A national vow was made to build a church to the Sacred Heart, and in 1873 the National Assembly declared it a work of public utility... on the hill of the revolt.

   The foundation stone was laid in 1875, but Montmartre is riddled with old gypsum quarries, so the builders had to sink deep shafts of masonry, tens of metres down, to carry the weight. The basilica was finished in 1914, and the war delayed its consecration until 1919. In the bell tower hangs La Savoyarde, a bell of about nineteen tonnes cast in Annecy in 1891, one of the heaviest in France. Inside, prayer before the altar has continued day and night, without interruption, since 1885.

   Behind the basilica runs a street with a pointed name: rue du Chevalier-de-la-Barre, after a young man executed in 1766 for failing to show respect to a religious procession. The anticlerical city council chose it as a deliberate reply to the church. Montmartre never stops arguing with itself. Follow that street west, cross rue du Mont-Cenis and carry straight on into rue Cortot, to the oldest house on the hill.

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

   12 Rue Cortot, 75018 Paris, France

   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.

6. 6. Place du Tertre & Saint-Pierre de Montmartre

   Place du Tertre, 75018 Paris, France

   Walk into the square and you are in the middle of a forest of easels: painters squinting at their canvases, portraitists offering to sketch you in ten minutes, café tables pushed under the trees. It can feel like a stage set... but this was once the real heart of the village of Montmartre, where the villagers gathered, argued and voted.

   Tertre simply means a small mound, the top of the hill. When Montmartre became a commune during the Revolution, its first town hall stood on this square. The village was only absorbed into Paris in 1860, and after the First World War local artists and pranksters founded the Free Commune of Montmartre, a playful republic that still exists. There is also a famous tale that the word bistro was born here in 1814, when Russian Cossacks occupying Paris shouted bystro, quickly, at the waiters. It is a lovely story but most linguists do not believe a word of it.

   Now walk to the corner of the square, to the modest stone church with the little bell tower: Saint-Pierre de Montmartre. It is far older than the white basilica looming behind it. It was the church of the royal abbey, consecrated in 1147 by Pope Eugene the Third, and Queen Adelaide, who founded the abbey, is buried inside. Look for the old marble columns near the entrance and in the choir: they are said to come from a Roman temple that once stood on the hilltop.

   The name of the hill itself is a riddle. One theory says Mons Martis, the mount of Mars, after that temple. The other says Mons Martyrum, the mount of the martyrs, after Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, beheaded on this hill in the third century. Legend says he picked up his own head, washed it in a spring, and walked north for several kilometres, until he fell where the basilica of Saint-Denis now stands.

   In 1794 the church tower carried something entirely new: a relay of Claude Chappe's optical telegraph, wooden arms signalling across the sky on the line to Lille, which could bring news from the northern front to Paris in about an hour.Leave the square by rue Norvins, heading west, and turn right into rue des Saules, which drops steeply down the north side of the hill.

7. 7. The Montmartre Vineyard & Au Lapin Agile

   22 Rue des Saules, 75018 Paris, France

   At the corner of rue des Saules and rue Saint-Vincent, look over the fence at an improbable sight in a capital city: rows of grapevines climbing a steep slope. And opposite them, a low cottage with green shutters, with a painted sign of a rabbit leaping out of a saucepan.

   Montmartre was wine country for centuries. The abbey's nuns tended vines all over the hill. When this plot was threatened by building in the early 1930s, local artists fought to keep it open, and in 1933 the city planted the Clos Montmartre. Today there are around two thousand vines, mostly gamay and pinot noir. Every October the Fête des Vendanges fills the streets for the harvest, and the small number of bottles is sold for local charities.

   The cottage is Au Lapin Agile, one of the oldest cabarets in Paris, still going today. It once had a grimmer name, the Cabaret des Assassins. Then, around 1875, the caricaturist André Gill painted that sign of a rabbit escaping the pot, and people called the place the lapin à Gill, Gill's rabbit... which slid into Lapin Agile, the nimble rabbit. In the early 1900s it was run by Frédéric Gérard, known as Frédé, who played the guitar and kept a donkey called Lolo. Picasso, Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Utrillo drank here, sometimes paying with pictures.

   In 1910 the writer Roland Dorgelès decided to make fun of the avant-garde. He tied a paintbrush to Lolo's tail, set a canvas behind the donkey and let him swish. The result, titled And the Sun Went to Sleep over the Adriatic, was shown at the Salon des Indépendants under the name of an invented Italian painter, Joachim-Raphaël Boronali, and some critics discussed it seriously before Dorgelès revealed the hoax. Picasso left his own tribute: a painting called At the Lapin Agile, from 1905, with himself as a harlequin at the bar. In 1989 it sold for around forty million dollars.

   From the corner, climb back up rue des Saules. At the top of the slope, on the corner of rue de l'Abreuvoir, you will pass a small pink house with green shutters, La Maison Rose, which Maurice Utrillo painted and made famous. Turn right into rue de l'Abreuvoir and follow it to the little tree-shaded square at its far end.

8. 8. Place Dalida: The Singer of Montmartre

   Place Dalida, 75018 Paris, France

   Stop in the little cobbled square where rue de l'Abreuvoir meets rue Girardon, and turn to look back the way you came: the street drops away between old houses and garden walls, and above the trees floats the white dome of the Sacré-Cœur. Now turn around and meet the woman in bronze.

   The bust is Dalida, one of the biggest stars French song has ever known. She was born Iolanda Gigliotti in Cairo in 1933, to Italian parents; her father was first violinist at the Cairo opera house. After being crowned Miss Egypt in 1954 she came to Paris hoping to act, and became a singer instead. Bambino made her famous in 1956, and she sang in many languages, from Italian and Arabic to German and Hebrew, moving from chanson to disco without ever losing her audience.

   She lived just around the corner, in a house on rue d'Orchampt, from 1962 until the end of her life. Behind the glamour lay a chain of tragedies: several of the men she loved took their own lives, and on the night of 2 to 3 May 1987, so did she, leaving a note saying that life had become unbearable, and asking to be forgiven. She was fifty-four. Her grave lies in the Montmartre cemetery, which you will reach later on this walk.

   The bust was made by the sculptor Aslan and unveiled in 1997, when the square was given her name. Look at it closely and you will see that parts of the bronze have been rubbed bright gold by thousands of hands. Somewhere along the way a superstition took hold that touching it brings luck in love. Her fans find it disrespectful, the visitors keep doing it, and the shine keeps growing... a strange little monument to the distance between a legend and a woman.

   Now walk south along rue Girardon. Within a few steps, on the small Place Marcel-Aymé, a man is climbing out of a stone wall, his arm and his anxious face poking through. He is Dutilleul, the clerk from Marcel Aymé's wartime story Le Passe-Muraille, who discovers he can walk through walls and ends up stuck in one forever. The writer lived in the building behind, and the statue was sculpted in 1989 by the actor Jean Marais. Then carry on down to rue Lepic and the windmill on the corner.

9. 9. Moulin de la Galette: The Last Windmills of Montmartre

   83 Rue Lepic, 75018 Paris, France

   At the corner of rue Lepic and rue Girardon, look up: perched on top of a restaurant, a wooden windmill with dark sails stands against the sky. A little further down rue Lepic, behind a fence and trees on private ground, you can glimpse a second, older one. They are the last survivors of some thirty mills that once turned on this windy hill.

   The older one is the Blute-Fin, built in 1622, and the one above you is the Radet, from 1717, moved a short distance to this corner in the 1920s. For generations both belonged to a family of millers, the Debrays. Their flour fed Paris, but they found a better business: on Sundays they sold little flat cakes, galettes, with a glass of milk or wine, to the walkers who climbed the hill. Soon there was music, then a dance floor, and the mills gave their name to the Moulin de la Galette, the most famous dance hall in Montmartre.

   The family had a darker legend too. In 1814, when the armies allied against Napoleon reached the gates of Paris, the millers of Montmartre are said to have fought from their windmills. One of the Debrays was killed, and the story goes that his body was cut to pieces and nailed to the sails of his mill. Nobody can confirm the gruesome details... but Montmartre has been telling the story for two centuries.

   By the 1870s seamstresses, shop girls, students and painters danced here every Sunday afternoon. In 1876 Renoir painted them in Bal du moulin de la Galette, sunlight dappling straw hats and striped dresses, with his friends and local girls as models. It is now one of the jewels of the Musée d'Orsay. Van Gogh, who lived just down the street, painted these windmills again and again, and Toulouse-Lautrec painted the dance hall too. And in the autumn of 1900, a nineteen-year-old Spaniard on his very first visit to Paris made it the subject of one of his first Paris canvases. His name was Pablo Picasso.

   The dance hall is long gone, and the sails no longer grind anything. But on a windy day, if you stand here quietly, you can almost hear the accordion. Follow rue Lepic as it twists down the hill, past the gate of the Blute-Fin, and look out for number 54.

10. 10. 54 Rue Lepic: Van Gogh's Paris Apartment

    54 Rue Lepic, 75018 Paris, France

    Find the plaque on the façade of number 54, an ordinary, respectable apartment building on a bend of rue Lepic. From June 1886 to February 1888, on the third floor, lived two Dutch brothers: Theo van Gogh, a successful young art dealer, and his older brother Vincent, who had turned up in Paris almost without warning.

    Vincent arrived with dark, earthy canvases of Dutch peasants painted in browns and greys. In Paris he discovered the Impressionists, Japanese prints and the young painters of his own generation. He studied for a while in the studio of Fernand Cormon, where he met Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard, and his palette exploded. In two years he painted more than two hundred pictures in Paris: flowers, still lifes, self-portraits because he could not afford models, and the view from this very building, across a sea of Paris rooftops.

    Living with him was another matter. Vincent quarrelled with visitors, filled the flat with paint and canvases, and hardly slept. In a letter to their sister in 1887, Theo wrote that it was as if there were two people inside his brother: one marvellously gifted, tender and refined, the other selfish and hard-hearted. And yet Theo never stopped paying for his paint, his rent and his food.

    Theo worked for the firm of Boussod, Valadon and Company and ran its gallery on boulevard Montmartre, where he quietly showed modern painters like Monet, Degas and Gauguin. Without him there would be no Vincent at all: the hundreds of letters between the two brothers are the reason we know so much about how Vincent thought and worked. In February 1888, worn out by the grey Paris winter, Vincent took the train south to Arles, looking for light. He never lived in Montmartre again.

    Cross the street and count up to the third floor. Behind those windows a Dutch painter learned to see in colour... and among his Paris canvases were his first sunflowers. Now follow rue Lepic all the way down to the boulevard, turn right, and right again into the short avenue Rachel, which ends at the gate of a cemetery.

11. 11. Cimetière de Montmartre: The Quarry of the Famous

    20 Avenue Rachel, 75018 Paris, France

    Walk through the gate and down into the hollow. The cemetery lies below the level of the streets around it, and above the graves the iron bridge of rue Caulaincourt crosses the tombs, with traffic rumbling over the dead. Cats sleep on the warm stone. This is the quiet underside of the hill you have just climbed.

    The hollow is not natural. This was a gypsum quarry, one of many that gnawed into Montmartre for centuries. The white stone was baked into plaster, so much of it that fine plaster all over the world came to be called plaster of Paris. In these same quarries the naturalist Georges Cuvier studied the bones of strange vanished mammals, and used them to argue that whole species could disappear from the earth. The cemetery opened here officially in 1825, outside what were then the limits of the city.

    And then, the residents. The painter Edgar Degas lies in his family tomb. Here are the composers Hector Berlioz and Jacques Offenbach, whose galop from Orpheus in the Underworld became the anthem of the cancan, Alexandre Dumas the younger, the poet Heinrich Heine, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, with a statue of him as the sad puppet Petrushka, and the filmmaker François Truffaut. Stendhal is here too, under an epitaph in Italian that calls him Arrigo Beyle, Milanese: he wrote, he loved, he lived.

    Look for the tomb of Dalida, the singer whose bronze bust you met on the hill: a life-size white statue of her stands beneath a golden sunburst, and the flowers in front of it are almost never allowed to wilt. Not far away rests Louise Weber, known as La Goulue, the queen of the cancan, who died poor and forgotten in 1929. In 1992 her remains were brought here from a suburban cemetery, back to the neighbourhood she had made famous.

    Émile Zola was buried here too, until 1908, when his remains were moved to the Panthéon; his tomb is still here, and his wife lies in it. When you are ready, leave by the same gate, walk back along avenue Rachel to the boulevard and turn left. A red windmill is waiting for the finale.

12. 12. Moulin Rouge: The Red Windmill of the Cancan

    82 Boulevard de Clichy, 75018 Paris, France

    Here it is on boulevard de Clichy: the red windmill turning above the doors, the lights, the coaches unloading in front of the most famous cabaret in the world. Those sails have never ground a single grain of flour. From the very first day, they were pure advertising.

    The Moulin Rouge opened on 6 October 1889, the year of the Eiffel Tower, when the world's fair had filled Paris with visitors. Its founders, Joseph Oller and Charles Zidler, wanted a palace of pleasure where workers and aristocrats could rub shoulders. In the garden stood a giant elephant, left over from the fair, and inside its belly, for gentlemen only, a dancer performed. On the dance floor, the star attraction was a wild version of an old quadrille, the cancan, all high kicks, splits and flying petticoats. The original building burned in 1915, and what you see was rebuilt after the war.

    The queen of the floor was Louise Weber, La Goulue, the glutton, a nickname she earned by draining the glasses of the customers. She was said to be able to kick a gentleman's hat clean off his head with the tip of her shoe. Her partner was Valentin le Désossé, Valentin the Boneless, a tall, thin man in a top hat who danced like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

    And at a table near the dance floor sat a man barely a metre and a half tall, sketching. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, heir to one of the oldest noble families in France, had broken both his legs as a teenager, and they never grew again. He became the eye of the Moulin Rouge. In 1891 his poster of La Goulue, a white whirl of petticoats in the middle of the dance floor, was pasted all over Paris, and it changed what a poster could be. He died in 1901, only thirty-six years old.

    So there is the whole hill, in one walk: the nuns and the millers, the martyrs and the Communards, the hungry painters in the laundry boat, the singer in bronze and the dancers in petticoats. Montmartre was always the place where Paris came to escape from itself... and on this corner, long after you have gone home, the red sails will still be turning.