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We can make different walks
from the gare. But let’s take one, which will lead us to some painters. It is
remarkable how bourgeois the surroundings of their home was. Question is if the
Impressionists thought the same about what was at that time a flamboyant new
style of buildings with that typical 19th century architecture.  The
centre, Pont de l’Europe or Place de l’Europe (metro Europe) is now a 1930
version of the location above the gare Saint-Lazare, for them a symbol of the
modernizing and industrializing France. What was called “Le capitalisme
triomphant.” GUSTAVE CAILLEBOTTE (1848-1894), the most wealthy but as it is
said the less talented of them all, made a beautiful painting about, with
himself on the foreground, with high hat and white scarf. (see picture). A dandy
of the beginning of the industrial era. MONET went to the end of the platform
and painted the Pont de l’Europe in another way (musee Marmottan).
In the years sixty of the 19th century, the parents of CAILLEBOTTE
built a hotel particulier at no.77 of the nearby rue de Mirosmenil, now a
fixation point for the jobless sine it houses the jobless allocations office. At
the other side of the place, you have the rue de Saint-Petersbourg. In the first
house, at no.4 EDOUARD MANET lived in 1868 at the bel-etage, together with his
piano-teaches, a woman from Dutch origin, Suzanne Lehnhoff, with whom he had
already a 14-year-old boy. His atelier was at no.51 and he died in 1883 at
no.39.
The rue de Moscou crosses the rue
de Saint-Petrsbourg. At no.29, the poet MALLARME kept an artistic
« salon » for painters and writers. MALLARME was an English teacher
from a certain HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC who was a pupil at the Condorcet high
school 8, rue du Havre (also just next to the station). Like MARCEL PROUST, to
name another famous name. The art dealer PAUL DURAND-RUEL, who believed in the
Impressionists from the very beginning, received his friends at no.34 rue de
Rome. Look at a Paris map. All these places are in walking distance from each
other.
But let’s get first to the end of the rue de Saint-Petersbourg. Via place
Clichy, described very thoroughly by Ferdinand Celine in its “Voyage au bout
de la nuit”, we walk along the avenue de Clichy. At no.9 used to be the famous
café Guerbois, where everybody came at the advice of EDOUARD MANET. He sold his
painting objects and furniture at no11, just next door! So he kept two tables
reserved on Friday night for his friends. SISLEY, BAZILLE, RENOIR came very
often. An anecdote tells that PAUL CEZANNE called the well-fed banker’s son
EDGARD DEGAS “an asshole looking like a notary”. And DEGAS trumpeted
everywhere that “the police would do a good job to arrest anyone who copied
nature in painting without intelligence”. Of course this caused a big brawl
and quarrel that peaked to unknown heights when MANET cut the head of his wife
out of a painting by DEGAS, because he thought DEGAS represented her on purpose
with an ugly face. Everything calmed down when EMILE ZOLA moderated the war and
became a big defender of the new painting style.
Bibliography
The crisis of Impressionism
1878-1882, by Ann Harbor (university of Michigan)--Visions of City and Country:
prints and photographs of 19th century France (Worcester Art museum and New-york,
American federation of Arts), Camille Pissarro in Paris: a study of his
development by R.Coe (Gazette des Beaux-Arts 1954)--Correspondance de Cezanne,
recueillie, annotée et pré facée par J.Rewald, (Paris, ed.Grasset 1937)
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