An independent atlas of the arts, with Paris at its heart.
The Paris Atlas is built around a simple idea: art becomes more interesting when you can see the lives and places around it.
We began with literary Paris — the writers of the 1920s, the books they wrote, and the cafés, apartments, bookshops, and salons where their lives crossed. But the map did not stay there for long. Literature led to painting, painting to photography, photography to film, and film to the stage.
Paris is in the title because it is where we began, not because it is where we plan to stop.
How the atlas works
Everything in the atlas belongs to the same growing map. A novel leads to its author, its publisher, the apartment where it was written, the people who read the manuscript, and the movements it helped shape. A painting might lead to a studio, a model, an exhibition, or another artist working a few streets away.
Those connections are built from individual, sourced claims. Some are firmly documented. Others are probable, disputed, or simply part of the folklore. We try not to flatten those differences. A good story is not automatically a true one, though it may still deserve to be told.
We care about the physical places, too. Addresses and coordinates are researched by hand, buildings are illustrated, and maps bring the history back onto the streets where it happened.
The atlas is built one entry and one connection at a time.
What belongs here
The atlas follows connections rather than a checklist. We add a work, person, or place when it helps tell a larger story or makes another part of the map clearer.
Publishers, galleries, archives, and estates are welcome to send us books, images, records, and corrections. What enters the atlas remains an editorial decision.
Team
Adriana Pope
Adriana founded The Paris Atlas from the Mojave Desert, about as far from a Left Bank café as geography allows. She studied modern literature at UC Santa Cruz, where she received a Presidential Scholarship, and is the author of Of Triumph and Solitude. Her territory is the literature of the American expats in France, and she holds that there is no wrong hour of the day to walk the Seine. Every entry in the atlas passes across her desk.
Nathan Pope
Nathan builds the atlas itself — the graph, the maps, and everything underneath. Before the atlas, he built payment systems at Shopify used by more than 10,000 merchants; he now applies the same instincts to a stranger problem: mapping the lives, works, and places that make up cultural history. His corners of the map are French cinema and the Impressionist painters.
When we can, we go ourselves.
Affiliate disclosure
Some links on The Paris Atlas are affiliate links. If you buy something through one of them, the retailer may pay us a small commission at no additional cost to you.
Commissions help support the atlas. They do not decide what appears in it or what we recommend.
Corrections
Dates get confused. Buildings disappear. Memoirs contradict one another. Even reputable sources repeat stories that do not survive a closer look.
If we get something wrong, tell us. We'll check it against the record and correct the page.
Privacy and terms
The Paris Atlas is owned and operated by Ongoing LLC.
We use analytics and advertising tags — Google Analytics, the Meta Pixel, and the Pinterest Tag — to understand which parts of the atlas people read and to measure the advertising that brings readers here. Anything you save remains connected to your account, and we do not sell account information or newsletter lists.
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Say hello
Found a mistake? Have an argument to make? Know a work, person, or place that ought to be on the map? The inbox is read by a person.
hello@theparisatlas.com
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