We were on a tight schedule after arriving in Paris, we had this particular day pencilled in for some time. It was to be a day of pilgrimage to Montmartre. I had been to the mount once previously, thirty years ago.
Since I was fifteen I have been fascinated by the French Impressionist artists, their works and their movement, intoxicated might be a better word. For such a group of artists to break with tradition – influencing each other in developing an original approach to painting so original that it outraged and inspired officiandos, patrons and lay art watchers alike, and still does 120 years later – it captured my imagination. They were Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley, Lautrec, Monet, Manet, Utrillo, Van Gogh, Pissaro, Seurat, Gaugin, Cassatt, Valadon et al.
I was in France to launch my second book in French. Travelling with my wife, we were housed at the Australian Embassy apartments and had Melbourne author Rosalie Ham as a roommate, arranged by our cultural attaché in Paris.
On Montmartre Day it rained heavily all morning but we were not deterred. The day previous it rained also, Rosalie joined my wife and I visiting the Musée d'Orsay, the converted railway station on the River Seine, on the opposite bank to the Louvre. The Musée d'Orsay houses the largest collection of French Impressionist in the world, transferred from the Musée du Jeu Paume in 1986 where they were when I last saw them. The three of us headed off, found the underground Metro at Bir-Hakeim near the Eiffel Tower and surfaced at the foot of Montmartre at the Abbesses station. It was still raining, but lightly.
Without a detailed map of Paris we set off up hill on foot. Of course we found the long way round and the rain became torrential. We had one umbrella and I chivalrously left it to the women … my clothes were soon soaked. Suddenly my heart quickened as I realised we had stumbled upon one of Maurice Utrillo’s immortalised streets near the summit. My wife took the following picture – see Utrillo’s painting below.
