Montagnes-Russes

Narrator: 

It’s 1890. At the amusement hall Montagnes-Russes in Paris, we find a roller coaster, shooting galleries, well-dressed and well-heeled gentlemen who are after adventure – and prostitutes who are after the gentlemen’s money. Here we see all of them together.  

Ingvild Åse Hammervoll, an art historian at the National Museum explains:   

Ingvild Åse Hammervoll:    

Many European artists flocked to Paris, attracted of course by the city's avant-garde art scene with its new and experimental trends. But the city also had another side and from 1850 was known as “the Pleasure Capital”.  

And Willumsen has managed to capture both of these sides of Paris in this painting. So what are we actually looking at?  

Jan Sælid:   

The Montagnes-Russes. This was well known as a promenade for cocottes. The painting is not of a place that resembles this establishment, the painting itself is the Montagnes-Russes.  

Narrator: 

This is what Jens Ferdinand Willumsen said about his painting:   

Jan Sælid:   

The two green lines at the top represent a roller-coaster track, which extends the entire length of the saloon. There’s a man sitting at the centre whose interest in the cocotte sitting next to him is shown quite clearly, in that I allow him to be kind of sucked towards her.  

Ingvild Åse Hammervoll:   

Willumsen himself described the women as cocottes. In French, this word is the feminine diminutive of coq, meaning cock or rooster, and it is an old-fashioned word for a courtesan or high-class prostitute. 

One could find these women in many places in Paris. Prostitution was widespread at all levels of society and cocottes could be found in cafés and boulevards, as we see here in the Montagnes-Russes, and also in boxes at the opera and, of course, in the city's brothels. But for artists, images of them were pretty much irresistible, as a phenomenon that epitomized the modern, vibrant metropolis that Paris represented at the time.