Tove Jansson’s Paris travels continued after her first visits to the city as a young art student. This second part of the series on Tove Jansson’s Paris travels centres on two significant visits to Paris with her parents. They had both studied art in the city, just like their daughter.

The young aspiring pictorial artist Tove Jansson spent the spring of 1938 in Paris, studying art and enjoying the invigorating cultural scene of the city, just like her parents had done almost 30 years earlier.

It’s a little melancholy, perhaps, revisiting a city one hasn’t seen for 39 years – especially that city, in the springtime.

In May 1938, Tove Jansson’s father, sculptor Viktor “Faffan” Jansson, came to visit his daughter in Paris and stayed for three weeks.

Though the Jansson family was a close-knit unit with warm relationships and great mutual respect, Tove’s relationship with her father had grown increasingly strained as she developed stronger political opinions. Faffan was right-leaning politically, while Tove’s circle of friends was leftist, and their opposing political views had been creeping into more and more of their interactions.  

“It would be great fun to take my papa for walks here”

Tove had pleaded with her mother to convince Faffan to come to Paris:

“It would be such great fun to take my papa Faffan out for walks here – so many people have said he’s got to come.”

When Viktor finally arrived, the visit proved a success. Tove wrote home to her mother:

“Here we sit, Papa and I, in my hotel room, drinking Cinzano and eating langouste, with my suitcases for a table. “It reminds me of a time in Italy with Signe,” says Papa. He is so happy to be here in Paris that it is a pleasure to hear and see him. Together we search out places he remembers from the old days, your studios, Cawan’s and his. Bistros, streets and extra-special corners and parks, and everywhere he tells me just what had happened on that spot, usually finding the setting unchanged.”

Paris, 1938. Oil painting by Tove Jansson.

“Papa found it all very changed and exceedingly touristy”

The Paris of Viktor Jansson’s youth, when he had studied art with Tove’s mother in 1910, was gone. Yet father and daughter rejoiced in revisiting places that both had come to love and which had been formative for their respective development as artists.

“Then we mooched through the little alleyways along the Seine from Notre Dame, where we turned and gradually made our way up to Montparnasse. Papa found it all very changed and exceedingly touristy with all its neon lights, new places of entertainmentand its whole cosmopolitan air. We took a table at Dôme’s pavement café and sat there watching the stream of people flowing by, complete with all those fantastical figures only Paris can produce. It was warm and a clear, moonlit night, Papa bought me a rose and we drank café noir and Benedictine.”

Mooching around the streets of Paris in the wee hours

In her letters home to her mother, Tove describes long walks and even longer nights, during which father and daughter talk about art, life and everything in between, thoroughly enjoying the city and each other’s company, “mooching around until 3 o’clock” in the morning. 

“The hotel staff are terribly interested in Papa and especially, I think, in the fact that we always go out and come in together – it isn’t very common here for a father and daughter to so obviously enjoy each other’s company!”

In fact it seems like the city itself helps bring father and daughter closer.

“We’re so happy, so close, and perpetually talk about you. Papa tells me about the two of you in your early time here, and how he loves you, all of us. We talk about it all, everything that was left unresolved and has been festering away, and tell each other we had to meet so far away to get close to each other.”

Tove Janssons’s Paris Travels with Ham

Tove Jansson travelled to Paris with her mother Signe “Ham” Hammarsten Jansson in 1954 for a shorter stay: three days tucked between longer stays in London and the French Riviera. They stay in a hotel on rue de la Gaité where Ham and Faffan once had a studio. 

This time Faffan has declined to come, stating that he’d feel homesick. Tove describes the stay in Paris in a letter to her friend Eva Konikoff dated May 7th:

“Their Atelier Impasse was exactly as it had been, Ham said, with its ivy, sculpture fragments and cats; the only change was that bits of abstract painting were visible through the decaying windows. We went to the little eatery where they used to order snails and walked to all the places we both remembered and loved, but only stayed three days. It’s a little melancholy, perhaps, revisiting a city one hasn’t seen for 39 years – especially that city, in the springtime.”

Read about Tove Jansson’s Parisian art studies in the first part of the series on Tove Jansson’s Paris travels. 

Sources: 

Quotes from Tove Jansson’s letters, published in Letters from Tove Jansson, Edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death.