The reader follows in the footsteps of the artists from the Pont Neuf depicted by Monet and Renoir to the intersection where Caillebotte painted his haunting street scene. From the balcony of the Louvre where Monet literally and figuratively turned his back on the establishment, to the Gare St. Lazare, the train station from which he departed for his home in Giverny. This charming guide also provides the addresses of the studios where the painters worked, the buildings where they lived, their birthplaces, gravesites and—this being Paris—the cafes where they gathered.

Dining recommendations, many from the Impressionist era, round out the tours:

• A turn-of-the-century café decorated with old wooden palettes, a hang-out for generations of students from the nearby École des Beaux-Arts
• An elegant tea salon across the street from the Louvre and just outside the frame of Monet’s Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois
• A bustling brasserie—a historic monument—across from the Gare St-Lazare, decorated with faience murals depicting the towns served by the station.

Ellen Williams tells the stories behind each painter and painting, a tale of young, struggling artists and the city where they lived—long before the world knew them as Impressionists. Based on an article that originally appeared in the Guggenheim Museum magazine, The Impressionists’ Paris will delight the lifelong Francophile, the first-time visitor to Paris and the armchair traveler alike.

FROM “How to use this book”
This book introduces you to the Paris of the French Impressionist painters, a Paris still vivid on museum walls but easily missed on the streets of the city today if you don’t know where to look.

On these walking tours you will visit not only the places the artists chose to paint but also the studios in which they worked, the buildings where they lived, and —this being Paris—the cafes in which they gathered.

Given the size of the city, these walks are remarkably manageable. The sites are not only close to one another, and arranged to be visited in roughly chronological order, but also near places of interest to lovers of Impressionism. The tour of the earlier paintings begins on the edge of the Left Bank near the Musée d’Orsay, whose collection includes several paintings discussed in the book; the walk of the later cityscapes is on the Right Bank, through the environs of the Gare Saint-Lazare and could be combined with a departure from that station for Monet’s home in Giverny. The third walk is to the sites of the Impressionist haunts—the cafes, dance halls, and cabarets. At each stop, look to the left-hand scrapbook pages for related topographical and historical notes, anecdotes about the painters and paintings, important addresses, and recommendations for conveniently located cafés, patisseries, and restaurants—many dating from the Impressionist era. These can all be located on the appropriate map, where additional sites mentioned in the text are indicated. Throughout the book, vintage postcards provide a photographic record of the sites as they existed when the painters selected then as subjects for their paintings.

Despite the relatively small territory covered on the walks, they will show you four distinct “faces” of the city: the historic Paris along the Seine, the bustling commercial Paris of the grands boulevards, Baron Haussmann’s bourgeois Paris in the quartier de l’Europe, and the rustic, bohemian Pris of Montmartre.

The paintings reproduced here introduce the stylistic and thematic ties that unite these artists as well as reflect the differences that separate them: Manet and Monet both created works of the city’s Gare Saint-Lazare, but one shows no trains, the other no people; Caillebotte and Monet both painted pedestrians crossing theough the rain-slicked streets of Paris, one in detailed sharp focus, the other with short dashes of pigment; Renoir and Degas both depicted Parisians imbibing, one revelers in the sunshine, the other alcoholics in the cold light of the morning after.

This book brings the museum experience out into the real world, to better appreciate both the art and the city, one through the other. The paintings are your guides to the Paris of the Impressionists, long gone but still visible to those who stop to look.

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