A French Painting with a Story

While in gay Paris last fall, I purchased this darling little Impressionistic painting at a flea market:

(I've propped it in this frame to photograph.  I still must have it properly framed)

The painting depicts a street in Montmartre, rue l'Abrevoir.

An abrevoir (a French word with which I was unfamiliar) is a watering trough for animals,  as the vendor explained to me.  

If you look closely, the Sacre-Coeur Basilica is visible in the distance:

I really like the soft, muted colours in the painting, although shades of pink and lavender don't really seem to work in any room right now.

I especially like the butterscotch and teal blue tones on the left side:

The vendor was an elderly man who said the artist, Fremont (he told me the first name which I forgot an hour later), had painted these small paintings in the 1940's and had been a rather prolific local painter.

Two other paintings in the set were also for sale.  The vendor said he had bought them a long time ago and kept them for himself for many years. He was reluctant to break up the trio, but I only wanted the single painting.  

On hindsight, I am also fond of the one below, which depicts the ubiquitous steep Montmartre stairways.  However, since the price was also steep, I only took the one:

The vendor also took pictures of the three paintings before I left, and seemed a bit teary-eyed to part with any of them.  He seemed like a kind fellow and we talked quite a while, as I struggled to cope with his lovely but very quickly spoken French.  He did seem thankful that the painting was going to an interested person with a sympathetic spirit.

When I got home, I was rather curious about rue l'Abrevoir, about whether the scene existed or was a construct of the artist's imagination.

So I Google-mapped it and sure enough, here is the street from the painting:

Note the street lamp on the left, the triangular-roofed building (now painted white) on the left with the dormer windows and chimney, and the stone wall to the right with trees atop it:

Further along the street you can see the pink house in the distance which appears in the painting:

The artist took some license, as the roof of the Sacre Coeur is just barely visible through the trees and not so prominently located as in the painting (unless perhaps the buildings blocking it in the distance were not there in the 1940's).

There is nothing better than owning a thing which has a story reaching back into the past.