Gertrude Stein Salon

The doorway at twenty-seven rue de Fleurus holds a heavy wooden frame behind which Gertrude Stein lived for forty-three years. Inside the salon, the walls were packed floor to ceiling with canvases by Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne. When Stein moved here in nineteen oh three, she began hosting Saturday evening gatherings where writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald sat on small chairs to argue about modernism. Picasso once spent eighty sessions in that room painting Stein’s portrait until she resembled a stone mask.