Auguste Renoir, Raoul Dufy, Émile Bernard, Othon Friesz, Suzanne Valadon and her son Maurice Utrillo all worked at 12 rue Cortot. This is not one artist’s house: it is half a dozen artists’ houses stacked in the same building, and since 1960 it has been the Musée de Montmartre, with the Jardins Renoir and a view that runs to the horizon, a few steps from the round everybody makes on the hill.
Anyone with difficulty walking needs to know this before climbing up: the building of the permanent collection has cobbles, steps and stairs, and nobody writes it up in large letters at the door. In exchange, the museum opens every day, which in Paris is almost an exception.
Why did all those painters end up in the same house?
Let’s go!
1. The manor house that was not this one
For decades the guides to Montmartre have said that the large house of the museum was the manor of Rosimond, the stage name of Claude de la Rose (about 1640 to 1686), the actor who took over Molière’s roles after his death in 1673. Rosimond did have a house in Montmartre from 1680, and the story is a good one for the way it ends too: he died on 31 October 1686 just after walking off stage, in the same circumstances in which Molière had died thirteen years earlier.
In June 2012, however, a heritage study the museum commissioned from the GRAHAL practice took the attribution apart: that house is not his.
It does not mean the house is not old. The Maison du Bel Air dates from the seventeenth century and is one of the oldest buildings on the hill. It only means that the famous name pinned on it does not belong to it, and that when you read «manor of Rosimond» on a tourist plaque you will know what to answer.
2. Why all those painters, and why here
Artists began climbing the Butte from 1870, and Renoir lived at 12 rue Cortot between 1875 and 1876: it was here that he painted the Bal du moulin de la Galette, La Balançoire and Le Jardin de la rue Cortot. Montmartre had been annexed to Paris a little more than fifteen years earlier, rents cost a fraction of those in the centre, and the hill still had windmills, kitchen gardens and vineyards. For a painter there were three things at once: space, light and low prices. It is why a single plaque carries six names.
The cafés and the cabarets multiplied in the 1880s. After Renoir came Émile Bernard, Charles Camoin, Othon Friesz, Raoul Dufy and, from 1912, the trio of Suzanne Valadon, her son Maurice Utrillo and her companion André Utter. This was no organised colony: it was a house of rented rooms at the top of a climb, and those who went there went because it was cheap.
3. The two houses, and the tenant Van Gogh painted
The museum occupies two separate buildings. The Maison du Bel Air, of 1660, holds the permanent collection. The Hôtel Demarne, a little later and remodelled under the Directory, has the neoclassical front, and since 17 October 2014 it has taken the temporary exhibitions, the Café Renoir and the bookshop.
In the lodge of the Hôtel Demarne, from 1866 to 1871, lived a colour merchant called Julien Tanguy. You know him under another name: he is the père Tanguy Van Gogh portrayed three times, seated and facing us, with Japanese prints painted behind him. He sold tubes on credit to painters nobody was buying, and took their canvases in exchange.
The name of the larger house explains itself. Bel Air is no affectation: from the upper part of the garden you see Paris as far as the line of the horizon, and in the seventeenth century, without the buildings that now close the view at the sides, that was what you bought along with the house.
4. Suzanne Valadon’s studio flat
How do you put back together a studio of which almost nothing was left?
When the museum decided to give the studio of the Valadon, Utrillo and Utter trio back to the public, practically nothing of the original furnishing remained. The reconstruction, opened on 17 October 2014, was entrusted to the stage designer Hubert Le Gall, who hunted down the pieces one by one, working from letters, from writings of the period and from historic photographs. The stove is back in its place, the mezzanine of the studio has been rebuilt, and Utrillo’s room has its wooden panelling again and the grille at the window.
It is worth looking at from outside as well, as in the photograph: it is a glazed studio built on top of the roof, the cheapest way of getting the light of a studio when a studio is beyond your means.
Valadon had been a circus acrobat, then a model for Puvis de Chavannes, for Renoir and for Toulouse-Lautrec, and she learned to paint by watching the people who painted her. In 1894 she was the first woman admitted to the Société nationale des beaux-arts, where she showed five drawings that Edgar Degas bought. Her son Utrillo, born when she was eighteen, would become the painter of the streets of Montmartre, the ones you still recognise as you climb towards the museum.
5. The Jardins Renoir
The gardens were reorganised in 2012 after the canvases Renoir painted while he lived here, and they are the reason this visit resembles no other in Paris: you sit on a bench, among the fruit trees, and the city lies below you.
Your ticket covers them, along with Valadon’s studio and the collection. If you are short of time and want the gardens alone, there is a reduced admission at 6 euros.
6. The vineyard and the Lapin Agile
From the lower part of the garden you look towards rue des Saules and see two things at once: the Clos Montmartre, the vineyard of the hill, and the pink and green cottage of the Lapin Agile.
The vineyard was replanted in 1933 on ground the city had taken back from the developers, and it is a symbolic gesture rather than a farm: the bottles are few and the harvest, in October, is a neighbourhood party. The Lapin Agile, across the street, is the cabaret where Picasso, Apollinaire and Modigliani spent their evenings when none of them had the money to pay for them.
7. The posters, the art Montmartre invented
Why has a cabaret advertisement ended up in a museum?
The collection runs to some six thousand pieces, paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture and posters, and the display arranges them by place: the Bateau-Lavoir, the studio in rue Cortot, the cabarets from the Lapin Agile to the Moulin Rouge, a room for the artists who stand for the hill and one that stages the shadow theatre of the Chat Noir again. What tells the story of the Butte better than all the rest, though, are the posters.
Moulin Rouge: La Goulue dates from 1891 and is the first poster Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec designed on commission. In December of that year three thousand copies were pasted up in the streets of Paris, and the city’s advertising changed overnight. The sheets that survived that print run are scattered today through museums across half the world.
The way the sheet is built is a lesson in graphic design. The dancer La Goulue is at the centre, against the light, with her white skirt and one leg raised. In the foreground, huge and entirely grey, is the profile of her partner Valentin le Désossé, with his top hat and one hand spread open at the bottom left. The audience is a black row of top hats without faces. Three planes of depth, three flat colours, no shadow: this is already a modern poster, and in 1891 nobody had done it yet.
Practical information
Details checked on 27 September 2026 on the official site museedemontmartre.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets, and there are two of them. Full price costs 16 euros when there is a temporary exhibition and 14 when there is not, and it always covers the permanent collection, Suzanne Valadon’s studio flat and the Jardins Renoir. The reduced rate is 10.50 euros and applies to students between 18 and 25, to teachers with the Pass Éducation and to disabled visitors. Children between 10 and 17 pay 9 euros, and under-10s go in free. Holders of the Amis du Louvre or Société des Amis d’Orsay card pay a flat 14 euros, so the card only helps on exhibition days. Gardens only. If you want the Jardins Renoir and the café alone, the ticket costs 6 euros. Season ticket. The annual card for the museum and the gardens costs 48 euros, and the one for two people 80. Opening hours. The museum opens every day, 10:00-19:00. The last admission is 45 minutes earlier and the rooms close at 18:45. Free admission. Tourism professionals go in free, as do ICOM members, licensed guides and members of the Vieux Montmartre. A press card, on the other hand, gives no right to free entry. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is not included: you buy the ticket separately. Accessibility. The building of the permanent collection has cobbles, steps and stairs, so access is difficult for anyone with mobility problems. No cloakroom. The museum has neither left luggage nor a cloakroom, so plan for whatever you are carrying. Café Renoir. The tea room opens every day, 11:00-18:00, and the tables look on to the garden. Getting there. The address is 12 rue Cortot, in the eighteenth. Get off at Lamarck-Caulaincourt on line 12, which is the gentlest climb. Otherwise get off at Anvers on line 2 and take the funicular, though the street rises after that. There is also bus 40, stop Saules-Cortot. How long it takes. Allow an hour and a half for the collection, the studio and the gardens, and half an hour more if you stop at the Café Renoir.
Where to go from here
The museum tells the story of the hill, but the hill is walked: the guide to the district, with the Sacré-Cœur, the Espace Dalí and the lanes that are left, is What to see in Montmartre.
A real studio, left as it was, is on the other side of the Seine: the Musée Bourdelle is Antoine Bourdelle’s sculpture studio with his plasters still inside it. And the pictures painted up here largely ended up in the Musée d’Orsay, which has the Bal du moulin de la Galette Renoir painted while he was living at 12 rue Cortot.
Photo credits: Jardins Renoir by GFreihalter (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons; Maison du Bel Air and Suzanne Valadon’s studio, Musée de Montmartre (CC BY-SA 4.0); vineyard and Lapin Agile by Véronique Pagnier, public domain. The Toulouse-Lautrec poster is in the public domain.
