The name of the place, the “Bateau-Lavoir”, means the laundry-boat because it looked like boats of laundry women floating on the Seine.

It’s a buildings in Montmartre. A group of artists lived there at the beginning of the 20th century. After the WWI, they started to move mainly to Montparnasse.

Indisputably the most famous resident of the place was Pablo Picasso (1904-1909) where he lived with his dog Frika. He reputedly invented cubism there and painted one of his finest works Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Other well-known artists lived in the Bateau-Lavoir:
Max Jacob, Amedeo Modigliani, Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Jean Cocteau.

The building were destroyed by a fire in 1970 and rebuild shortly after.