People-Watching in Paris

Having recently received my camera for my birthday prior to the trip to Paris that my mother and I embarked on in order to see the once in a lifetime Monet exhibition at the Grand Palais, I made sure that I snapped up as much of Paris as possible. Having gone a lot to Paris as a young girl, living in the South East of France at the time, I had fond memories of the city. What I remember the most were the typical tourist aspects of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, The Tuileries Garden, Notre Dame etc...

Pont d'Iena (Flo Whittaker)

Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862), Edouard Manet (1832-83)

The Tower in the Sun

Claude-Oscar Monet (1840-1926), Gare St. Lazare (1877)

What I didn’t remember was how good the people-watching in Paris is…

(Flo Whittaker)

(Flo Whittaker)

(Flo Whittaker)

(Flo Whittaker)

(Flo Whittaker)

(Flo Whittaker)

(Flo Whittaker)

(Flo Whittaker)

(Flo Whittaker)

(Flo Whittaker)

(Flo Whittaker)

All these photos were taken from Montmartre, a hill stretching 130ft high, known for the Basilica of the Sacre-Coeur and also for its gaudy nightlife and sordid side to Paris in the late 19th Century.

This is a poster advertising the Moulin Rouge by an artist called Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He was a chronicler of the nightlife in Montmartre at the end of the 1800's.

His drew his inspiration from the Circuses, dance halls and nightclubs, and brothels; all these spectacles were set down on canvas or made into lithographs.

Reine de Joie (1892), Toulouse Lautrec

He spent much time in brothels, where he was accepted by the prostitutes and madames to such an extent that he often moved in, and lived in a brothel for weeks at a time.

Rue des Moulins, The Medical Inspection (1894)

He shared the lives of the women who made him their confidant, painting and drawing them at work and at leisure. Lautrec recorded their intimate, often lesbian, relationships.

The Two Girlfriends (1894)

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec was deprived of a kind of life that a normal body would have permitted. He suffered from a brittle bone disease which stunted his growth and left him permanently crippled. Toulouse Lautrec had no choice but to live wholly for art.