01 Painting, Streets of Paris, by the artists of the time, Part 53 - With Footnotes

Antoine Blanchard, (1910-1988 French)

Le Moulin Rouge à Montmartre, c. 1900

Oil on linen canvas 

18" H x 21.5" W

Private collection

Moulin Rouge, (French for "Red Mill") is a cabaret in Paris. The original house, which burned down in 1915, was co-founded in 1889 by Charles Zidler and Joseph Oller, who also owned the Paris Olympia. Close to Montmartre in the Paris district of Pigalle on Boulevard de Clichy in the 18th arrondissement, it is marked by the red windmill on its roof.

Moulin Rouge is best known as the spiritual birthplace of the modern form of the can-can dance. Originally introduced as a seductive dance by the courtesans who operated from the site, the can-can dance revue evolved into a form of entertainment of its own and led to the introduction of cabarets across Europe. Today, the Moulin Rouge is a tourist attraction, offering musical dance entertainment for visitors from around the world. The club's decor still contains much of the romance of fin de siècle France. More on the Moulin Rouge

Antoine Blanchard is the pseudonym under which the French painter Marcel Masson (15 November 1910 – 1988) painted his immensely popular Parisian street scenes. He was born in a small village near the banks of the Loire.

Blanchard received his initial artistic training at the Beaux-Arts in Rennes, Brittany. He then moved to Paris in 1932 where he joined the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He won the Prix de Rome.

Like Édouard Cortès (1882–1969) and Eugène Galien-Laloue (1854–1941), Antoine Blanchard essentially painted Paris and the Parisians in bygone days, often from vintage postcards. The artist began painting his Paris street scenes in the late 1950s, and like Cortès, often painted the same Paris landmark many times, in different weather conditions or various seasons. The most recurrent topics were views of the capital city in cloudy or rainy days, showing streets busy with pedestrians in a rush to go home, and bright storefronts reflecting on wet streets.

Antoine Blanchard died in 1988. More on Antoine Blanchard

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