This building — twelve Rue Cortot — has been here since the sixteen hundreds. It's one of the oldest houses on the hill, and the list of people who lived and worked inside it is ridiculous.
In eighteen seventy-six, a young Pierre-Auguste Renoir rented a studio here. In that single year, in this building, he painted Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette — one of the most celebrated Impressionist paintings in the world. It's at the Musee d'Orsay now. He also painted The Swing and Garden on Rue Cortot. One address, one year, three masterpieces. Not a bad lease.
A few decades later, a woman named Suzanne Valadon moved in. And her story is one of the best in this entire neighborhood.
Her real name was Marie-Clementine. Born illegitimate in eighteen sixty-five. Mother was an unmarried laundress. She grew up on the streets of Montmartre — worked in a milliner's workshop, a funeral wreath factory, sold vegetables. At fifteen, she joined the Cirque Fernando as a trapeze acrobat. That lasted about a
year, until she fell and injured her back.
So she became an artists' model. She was seventeen. The painters she posed for were not. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was fifty-seven — they became lovers — and he used her as the model for EVERY figure in a single painting called The Sacred Grove. Every muse in that composition is the same teenage girl from different angles. Renoir painted her — she's bel
