Discovering the Plaine Monceau.
Experience the Belle Epoque art, architecture and elegance.
Including visits to Musée Nissim de Camondo and Musée Henner.

With art historian
Anne Catherine Abecassis.

As early as 1854, the outline of the future Monceau district was drawn up under the direction of Prefect Haussmann. Still, it was urbanized in the 1870s when architects competed fiercely to build new private mansions and artists’ studios.

The Plaine Monceau offers a unique panorama of 19th-century bourgeois architecture, from opulent mansions (such as the Hôtel de Camondo that we will visit) to bourgeois apartment blocks and artists’ studios. Residents included the financial and industrial bourgeoisie, magistrates and doctors, and many successful artists: painters Ernest Meissonnier, Édouard Detaille, J.J. Henner, John Singer Sargent, and Édouard Manet. Many of the most prominent figures of 19th-century Paris also lived here: Sarah Bernhardt, Alexandre Dumas, Edmond Rostand, as well as musicians such as Camille Saint-Saëns and Claude Debussy.

A tight social calendar punctuated life in the Plaine Monceau; each house had its “days” and it was fashionable to hold regular dinners that brought together the worlds of fashion, art, literature, and music. We will end our visit at one of the neighborhood’s last remaining period studios, now the Musée Jean-Jacques Henner.