Montmartre and Montparnasse

A hundred years ago, Montmartre, due north of the centre of Paris, was the gathering place for artists both local and foreign. Visible from a distance by the landmark of the Sacre Coeur church and famous for cabaret acts at the Moulin Rouge and Le Chat Noir, Montmartre was a magnet for great artistic names. Renoir, Degas and Matisse congregated here and Picasso and Van Gogh travelled from abroad.

The hotel Villa Van Gogh, in the Opera area just south of Montmartre, recalls the great Dutch artist. Van Gogh travelled to Paris in 1886 to work at the studio of Fernand Cormon and lived with his brother Theo. While in Paris, the artist was active in a circle that included Cezanne, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec. The latter artist made a drawing in pastels of Van Gogh in profile seated at a table in a bar. Van Gogh also met the great pointillist artist Seurat. Today, at the Villa Van Gogh, each floor of this three-star hotel is appropriately dedicated to the name one of the artist's contemporaries. During his two-year stay in Paris, Van Gogh created about 200 paintings including several street scenes in Montmartre. Thus there is plenty of material for the Villa Van Gogh. Each of the 24 rooms in the hotel bears the name of and is adorned with a painting by the master.

On the other side of town, on the left bank of the Seine in Montparnasse, is the Hotel Renoir Saint-Germain. Named after the great Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the hotel, as with the Villa Van Gogh hotel, has 29 rooms each of which contains a painting by the artist. Renoir spent much of his life around Paris, often visiting the Louvre to study the French masters and exhibiting at the Paris salon. Not surprisingly, like so many other painters, Renoir lived and worked in the artistic community in Montmartre. However, another artistic circle in Paris grew in Montparnasse and this area came to rival Montmartre in the early twentieth century as the main focus of artistic creativity. The Italian painter Modigliani, after an initial spell in Montmartre, settled in Montparnasse in 1909 and painted contemporaries there such as Picasso. The American photographer Man Ray made Montparnasse his home in the 1920s and photographed James Joyce. The German painter Max Ernst settled here in the same decade and worked with fellow Dadaists such as Andre Breton. Dying in 1919 after a long life, Renoir's name has been given to the three-star Hotel Renoir Saint-Germain in Montparnasse to echo this area's fame as a crucible of artistic activity.