I took this video below during my trip to Paris this summer, a day of gardens, artists, forgotten lives and the quiet pleasures of simply sitting beneath the trees in the grounds of the Parisian museum with an iced coffee.
I began at the Petit Palais, wandering through its beautiful collections before stepping into its lush garden. From there, I made my way to Montmartre and the Musée de Montmartre, one of those places in Paris that seems to preserve the atmosphere of another time.
The museum is surrounded by gardens, and on that particular day the heat was almost overwhelming. After visiting the galleries, I spent a long time lying on the grass, sipping an iced coffee and doing very little at all. Sometimes these are the moments I remember most clearly from travelling, an hour spent resting somewhere beautiful, with nowhere else to be.
The Musée de Montmartre occupies a house with deep connections to the artistic history of the neighbourhood. Renoir painted here, among others, and the museum’s permanent collection tells the story of Montmartre through the artists who lived, worked and gathered here.
I was especially drawn to the rooms devoted to Suzanne Valadon, whose presence seems to linger throughout the museum. Her studio, preserved here, makes the past feel strangely near: a small, intimate space belonging to an artist who refused to remain within the boundaries that had been prescribed for women of her time.
I also loved the temporary exhibition devoted to the largely forgotten Dutch artists Adya and Otto van Rees.
Their story is a fascinating one: two artists, lovers and fellow travellers through the European avant-garde, who lived at the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre from 1904 and found themselves at the heart of the extraordinary artistic community that was transforming modern art.
They crossed paths with artists including Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Kees van Dongen, Juan Gris and Piet Mondrian, moving through Cubism, Abstractionism and Dadaism while sharing a profound belief in art as a form of spiritual expression.
I was particularly moved by Adya van Rees, who struggled to establish herself as an artist at a time when women were so often overlooked or dismissed. There was something deeply touching in seeing how their shared life, conversations and love became intertwined with their artistic practice.
Ars longa, vita brevis: art is long, life is short is engraved on their tombstone.
There is something especially poignant about those words in relation to artists whose work has spent so many years in obscurity. Art sometimes waits patiently for us to find it again.
After Montmartre, I went to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the evening. I spent a long time there, thinking about the writers and artists who had once walked these same paths. In particular, I thought about Rainer Maria Rilke and Maurice Betz, and the Paris they knew in the 1920s.
The gardens were quieter by then. The worst of the heat had begun to soften, and Paris seemed to settle into its evening rhythm.
I like to imagine that this is one of the small gifts of travelling: to stand somewhere and realise that you are walking through a landscape that has held other people’s solitude, thoughts, loves and dreams long before you arrived.
For a few hours that day, I felt part of that long, invisible conversation between artists, writers, places and the people who come after them.
I hope you enjoy this little glimpse of my Paris.
