How Belle Époque Paris Captured the Hearts of American Travelers and Artists

There’s only so much teaching that an artist can do, even if they enjoy it, thought Anna McNulty Lester (1862-1900), as she gazed out upon the vast lawns of the Augusta Female Seminary in the springtime of 1897. Lester, at thirty-four years old, had made her mark as an accomplished instructor and administrator at the Staunton, Virginia, academy. Even though she gamely headed the school’s art department, she had reached a point of disillusionment in her life. She was tired and unfulfilled. And more than anything, she craved a new adventure. She needed to be taught again, for a change of pace.

Anna Lester had made unexpected pivots in her life before: after her own undergraduate days at the Augusta Female Seminary, the Georgia native opted out of pursuing a business career with her newly acquired bookkeeping degree and moved instead to New York City to pursue art classes at the famed Art Students League. This decision was not made lightly. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, for a woman to pursue a career as an artist was a risky maneuver, particularly when, in Lester’s case, she was already adequately trained to seek stable and financially secure accounting positions. But Lester had shown great promise as a student of drawing and painting, even winning a gold medal for her creations at Augusta. Art was a passion, a deep-set love; to chase such a dream seemed like a folly to many Americans, but for women like Lester, it was a calling.

Paris was truly a remarkable sight—and for many American travelers, unused to the charm of the Old World, the spectacle was newsworthy.

After many years of teaching art, she was finally ready to answer that call: she moved to Paris, France, to finish her own art education in the most artistic and inspiring city in the world. The enthusiasm pouring from her letters to her family confirm that she had made the right choice: gushing to her sister Edith after her arrival in the French capital in 1897, she wrote, “I am so glad that I am learning to draw from Life full length. I always have wanted to and I like the work immensely! When you get here [for Christmas] you will wish you had come to stay [indefinitely]. One cannot help being in love with Paris!”

Why Paris, though? When other European capitals, like London, Rome, and Berlin, boasted similar cultural enclaves and amenities, why did so many American women choose Paris as their destination? Simple: because it was Paris.

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Admittedly, Paris had not always been so beloved, and by the dawn of the nineteenth century it was in dire need of an overhaul. Though certain elements of the capital had long exhibited signs of royal or imperial splendor, such as the Musée du Louvre (itself a palace until the late eighteenth century) and the monumental Arc de Triomphe, much of the city was mired in muck and overwhelmed by disease, devastated especially by cholera in major outbreaks of 1832 and 1849. As Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the great administrator of the city’s renovations, wrote of central Paris, it was “a place choked by a mass of shacks inhabited by bad characters and crisscrossed by damp, twisted and filthy streets.” This reality had not been ignored or dismissed by previous generations of visitors. In 1784, future first lady of the United States Abigail Adams complained to her niece Lucy Cranch:

You inquire of me how I like Paris? Why they tell me I am no judge, for that I have not seen it yet. One thing I know, and that is, that I have smelt it. If I was agreeably dissapointed in London, I am as much dissapointed in Paris. It is the very dirtyest place I ever saw. There are some Buildings and some Squares which are tolerable, but in general the streets are narrow, the shops, the houses inelegant, and dirty, the Streets full of Lumber and Stone with which they Build.

The ascendancy of the French president Louis Napoléon, later known as Napoleon III when he became emperor of France in 1852—thus following in the authoritarian footsteps of his famous uncle for whom he was named, Napoléon Bonaparte—brought about one of the greatest undertakings of urban planning in modern history. As journalist Rupert Christiansen has deftly noted, Louis Napoléon’s reign could be defined by newness: new buildings, new streets, new parks, new sewers, new monuments, new libraries, new bridges, anchored by an all-new opera house, and all at the behest of Louis’s right-hand man, Baron Haussmann. Though Haussmann’s demolition crew largely sidestepped the city’s medieval heart—several sections of the Île de la Cité, in the middle of the Seine, were maintained as historically important—they otherwise bulldozed entire neighborhoods to improve public works, safety, and salubrity.

But the aesthetics of this huge project were just as critical as its practicalities. The “Haussmannization” of Paris, which continued well into the first decades of the twentieth century, transformed the city into one of the most breathtaking in the world, with a visual uniformity that was firmly maintained via Haussmann’s strictures on the height and design of the state-of-the-art buildings. New constructions, particularly luxurious apartments formed from white limestone replete with wrought iron balconies, were wreathed by public gardens and neatly landscaped parks, such as the Bois de Boulogne and the Parc Monceau.

Planting crews cultivated more than 50,000 trees, and public green space skyrocketed from twenty hectares at the beginning of Haussmann’s project to more than 1,600 hectares by 1870. Grand edifices crowned those freshly widened boulevards, the most spectacular being Charles Garnier’s glorious, green-domed opera house. Much of the Paris that visually delights tourists was born during this period. “Ah, Paris!” exclaimed Alice Rumph (1877-1957), a future Club resident, upon her first visit to the city. “A different atmosphere surrounds us as soon as we come within its walls and it strikes me immediately as being the gay, beautiful city it is always described to be. In the first drive from the station, its beauty is ravishing, and you wonder if it will not grow more commonplace on closer acquaintance. It never does.

To the early witnesses of the transformed and beautified city, Paris was truly a remarkable sight—and for many American travelers, unused to the charm of the Old World, the spectacle was newsworthy. In 1858, writer Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded his thoughts in his notebook, writing:

The splendor of Paris, so far as I have seen, takes me altogether by surprise; such stately edifices, prolonging themselves in unwearying magnificence and beauty, and, ever and anon, a long vista of a street, with a column rising at the end of it, or a triumphal arch, wrought in memory of some grand event…I never knew what a palace was, til I had a glimpse of the Louvre and the Tuilleries; never had any idea of a city gratified, till I trod these stately streets.

But beauty was not the only component that enthralled the city’s residents and visitors; its amenities did, too. The momentous changes accomplished by Haussmannization were equaled, especially in the latter years of the century, by a dedication to the pleasures of bourgeois life in Paris. As industrialization had inspired vast populations to relocate to the capital, a booming service industry followed to cater to their needs and wants. This was the era of the Grands Magasins, the large department stores, led by Le Bon Marché at the corner of the rue de Sèvres and rue de Bac on the Left Bank, where anyone could ogle the latest designer gowns and specialty home goods. After the delight of a shopping spree, one could be seated at any number of cafés or upscale restaurants for a leisurely meal, a café crème, or the popular fine à l’eau, a brandy or cognac diluted with a bit of tap water. The Parisian dining scene had nearly doubled between 1870 and the mid-1880s, approaching a total of almost 45,000 eateries.

Simply strolling down newly iconic wide boulevards like the Champs-Élysées was enchanting. By 1877, Paris was lit by the novel electric light, a feature befitting its nickname, “the City of Light.” It is this vision of Paris that often springs to mind even from the vantage point of the twenty-first century: a city bursting with color in Toulouse-Lautrec’s garish, beguiling images of the famed Moulin Rouge and other café-concerts; boulevards of nattily dressed flâneurs—the prototypical urban stroller—parading and living the good life. Paris was now elevated beyond simply a historically important city to an experience that could not be missed.

As Paris morphed into a city “where luxury is raised to a science,” according to an 1889 Baedeker’s guidebook, its reputation as a must see destination catapulted it into a star of global tourism, aided by a revolution in transportation. This included the expansion of rail systems across Europe, the development of undergrounds and subways throughout the world, including Paris’s own Métropolitain in 1900, and, most importantly, an improved transatlantic steamship crossing that reduced the once-arduous voyage to a relatively speedy one: “New York’s only a week away,” liners reassured those traveling eastward. This new transport meant visitors flooded the French capital in record numbers. To take one singular season as an example: social historian Harvey Levenstein has noted that “[b]etween April and October 1867, Paris hosted over eleven million visitors, ranging from the Czar of Russia and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to many thousands of less exalted excursionists from England and America.”

And oh, those excursionists from America: they positively inundated the city in the second half of the century, becoming one of the most prominent groups of foreign visitors. The period after the American Civil War coincided with a boom in the country’s wealth, and that wealth spread rapidly into newly prestigious leisure activities, like international tourism. Though upper-class Americans—typically men—had long engaged in that British-inspired tradition of the “Grand Tour” of Europe to fulfill expectations of a cultured existence, travel in the post–Civil War era soared as one of the predominant ways for the rich to showcase their literal good fortunes.

Once in Paris, tourists flooded recently inaugurated luxury hotels, with Americans in particular frequenting two monoliths: the Grand Hôtel du Louvre (place André Malraux, off the rue de Rivoli) and the Grand Hôtel de la Paix (2 rue Scribe, around the corner from the rue de l’Opéra, and today rebranded as the InterContinental Paris le Grand), where evenings could be whiled away playing billiards or sampling desserts in gilded dining halls. Just as Haussmann’s alterations drove up housing prices, so, too, did the massive influx of tourists. By 1867, Americans had “monopolized” both Grand Hôtels to such a large degree that the British travel entrepreneur Thomas Cook blamed Americans for a 50 percent spike in lodging prices.

So seductive were these visions of cultural excellence that, to an aesthete, Paris was unbeatable—and it quickly became the world’s top art destination,

But it was not just the wealthiest of Americans who flooded into Paris. That same post-Civil War richesse grew a middle class yet unseen in the relatively new nation. For them, too, travel became a newly accessible luxury. Take, as an example, the competitive fares for transatlantic voyages beginning in the 1870s. While the most popular sailing routes from New York City ran to either Liverpool or Cherbourg for around $250 or $300 for a first-class round-trip fare (approximately $8,600 to $10,300 in today’s dollars—certainly steep), budget-savvy Americans could save almost half the cost by seeking out slower boats departing from other cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Boston. And it kept improving, too—by the 1890s, as Levenstein confirms, bargain-basement fares from New York to Glasgow bottomed out at $55 round-trip, or approximately $1,800 in today’s currency. It is no wonder that in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, the number of moneyed Americans visiting the French capital nearly tripled from 50,000 a year to 125,000. For the first time, they could actually afford the journey.

Even more critically for our story of the Club: beginning in the 1870s and ’80s, American women, for the first time in history, led the charge to travel to France. Less than a century prior, men had visited Paris for their edification and (perceived, perhaps) social refinement. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, women were crossing the Atlantic in droves, often in small groups or alongside female family members to soak in its extravagances together. They enjoyed a freedom previously unimagined or historically only procured when in the company of male family members to chaperone them. These women would soon transform the city.

So delectable were their experiences that, not insignificantly, thousands of Americans opted to make their Parisian sojourns an extended one—perhaps even a permanent one. In 1874, Charles Carroll Fulton, editor of the Baltimore American, averred, “It is easy to get to Paris, but very hard to get away again, as most of the Americans now congregating here find…its attractions being so novel and varied.” Fulton focused his explanation of Paris’s allure to women as being due almost entirely to its department stores. Of course, shopping, fine dining, and high fashion were only part of the city’s charm. History, architecture, monuments, elegance, culture, sophistication—Paris had it all. But it lay an even greater claim in another vaunted area, one that was central to the lives of the French and foreigners alike: the fine arts.

It is almost laughable to list the hundreds of cultural institutions available to visit in Paris today—who has the time to document such abundance?—but it was similarly lush in the nineteenth century. Under Louis Napoléon’s benefaction, major expansions of two significant arts institutions were begun, highlighting their prominence as important cultural bastions of French society and the world at large: the Musée du Louvre and the École des Beaux-Arts, the most prestigious school of fine arts in France (if not the entire world). Smaller art schools of various types flourished, too, and there a student could learn the latest techniques and trends at the feet of the great masters, who would groom them to enter the competitive spheres of annual exhibitions, like the highly coveted Parisian Salon, the top exhibition in all of Europe. Such an inclusion could, in theory, vault a student into the stratosphere of artistic glory.

So seductive were these visions of cultural excellence that, to an aesthete, Paris was unbeatable—and it quickly became the world’s top art destination, particularly for painters and draftsmen of any gender. In his partially autobiographical novel The “Genius” (1915), Theodore Dreiser’s main character, an artist named Eugene, is so overcome not only by the city’s beauty but by its wealth of cultural treasures at the Louvre and the Musée du Luxembourg that he proclaims, “When I die, I hope I come to Paris. It is all the heaven I want.”

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Excerpted from The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris by Jennifer Dasal. Copyright © 2025 by Jennifer Dasal. Used with the permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury.