Père Lachaise

Delacroix

During a visit to Paris in September, I spent an afternoon wandering among the tombs and gravestones in the  Père Lachaise Cemetery. Montparnasse Cemetery has its fair share of celebrated names (Sartre, de Beauvoir, Baudelaire), but Père Lachaise holds a special attraction for anyone interested in French painting. I quickly fell into trainspotter mode, ticking off the names on my list of artists and writers. Armed with a downloadable map on my iPhone, some were easy to find (Delacroix, Géricault, Wilde, Proust), others less so: the Pissarro family grave is tucked away in a corner and Ingres is modestly placed behind other tombs.

I'm not sure why I felt the need to find the graves and to read the names; perhaps it was simply a tourist's impulse to 'do the sights'. As well as being a historical record, any cemetery encourages thoughts about life and death. But at least for me, Père Lachaise added a powerful sense of an artistic tradition.