The Renoir Gardens
Lawns, trees and benches — the calmest corner of Montmartre.
Musée de Montmartre — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Son of Groucho from Scotland — CC BY 2.0 · GFreihalter — CC BY-SA 4.0 · GFreihalter — CC BY-SA 4.0
Yes, and for an additional practical reason: it is **the only escape from the crowds** in this quarter. Montmartre by day is suffocatingly packed — the Place du Tertre, the Sacré-Cœur steps, all the lanes — and this museum sits in a quiet back lane with a **garden of benches and a view**. A moderate ticket buys you the quarter's real story (not the postcard version) and somewhere to sit for half an hour. Make it the **middle** of your Montmartre walk rather than the end.
Yes — the **Montmartre vineyard**, on the slope directly below the museum's gardens, one of the last survivors of vines that covered this hill for centuries when it was a village outside the city. The plot is small and the production symbolic, harvested each autumn at the **Montmartre harvest festival** (usually in October), a popular celebration with processions and music. The vineyard itself is **closed to the public** year-round, but the **museum gardens** are among the best places to look down on it — another point in the ticket's favour.
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The oldest house in Montmartre, and one of the calmest places in a quarter that knows no calm. It sits in a back lane away from the crush of the Place du Tertre, a seventeenth-century country house lived in by many artists when Montmartre was a village of vineyards and windmills outside Paris. **Renoir** lodged here and painted his well-known picture of the garden swing in its garden; **Suzanne Valadon** — the artists' model who became a major painter — lived here with her son the painter **Maurice Utrillo**, as did **Raoul Dufy** and others. The museum tells the quarter's story: how it became home to poor artists and cabarets, to **Le Chat Noir** and **Le Lapin Agile**, how Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen drew it in their posters, and how Picasso and modernism later moved on from it to Montparnasse. Its loveliest part is the restored **Renoir Gardens**: lawns, fruit trees, benches and a view over the real **Montmartre vineyard** surviving on the slope — one of the last vineyards in Paris. ⚠ This is the best place in Montmartre to sit away from the crowd.
Lawns, trees and benches — the calmest corner of Montmartre.
Suzanne Valadon's studio restored as it was.
One of the last in Paris, on the slope below the garden.
12 Rue Cortot, 75018 Paris
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