Paris Artists

Artists who have lived and worked in Paris, from Gothic glaziers and the Salon to Impressionism, Montmartre, Montparnasse and Surrealism.

1,065 works · 10 related artists

About

Paris has drawn artists since its Gothic builders began Notre-Dame in 1163 and filled the Sainte-Chapelle with walls of coloured glass. From the 17th century, the royal Academy and its official Salon exhibitions set the rules of French art, and ambitious painters from across Europe came to compete.

In the 19th century the city itself became the subject. Baron Haussmann's new boulevards, cafés and railway stations filled canvases by Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876) shows a Montmartre dance in dappled sunlight. Edgar Degas watched dancers backstage at the Opéra, and Georges Seurat built A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86) from tiny dots. The customs officer Henri Rousseau painted jungles he never saw. Early 20th-century Montmartre housed Pablo Picasso, and in the 1920s Montparnasse gathered Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine and Marc Chagall, while André Breton launched Surrealism in 1924.