Andrey Grin · Contemporary Oil Painter

The Painter of Paris

The Belle Époque had its painter of Paris. Today has Andrey Grin — a lifelong lover of the city who, at 66, moved there to paint it. Original oil paintings of Parisian street scenes: not the postcard Paris of a hundred years ago, but the city as it is now.

Le marché Aligre — oil. The market in the 12th arrondissement.

A city seen from the inside

For more than a century, “the painter of Paris” has meant a particular thing: the artist who catches a wet boulevard at dusk, a café spilling warm light onto the pavement, the grey pearl of a winter sky over the Seine. It is the tradition of Édouard Cortès — “the Parisian Poet of Painting” — of Antoine Blanchard and Eugène Galien-Laloue, who made the city’s ordinary streets feel like the centre of the world.

Andrey Grin paints in that lineage, but in the present tense. Where the tradition — and most of what sells under it today — looks back to a Paris that no longer exists, he paints the one he lives in: Montmartre climbing toward the Sacré-Cœur, the rue des Barres in the flat morning sun, the canal Saint-Martin under a coming storm. The same city, a century on, still worth a lifetime of looking.

Why “the painter of Paris”? Because the phrase has always belonged to whoever is willing to spend a lifetime looking at this one city closely. Grin is the living answer to it — a painter of Parisian street scenes working today, whose canvases hang in the same tradition as the masters who defined the term.

The long road to the easel

Grin’s path to Paris was slow and deliberate. Born in Moscow in 1956, he spent a career in the city’s architecture and urban development — years given to how a great city looks and holds together — while quietly collecting paintings of the School of Paris. He had loved the city since his very first journey abroad; that trip made him a francophile for life.

In the early 2020s he set the career aside, took up oils in earnest, and in March 2022 moved to Paris — to finally live inside the light he had loved from a distance for fifty years. Largely self-taught, he now paints nearly every day: a peintre de dimanche, in the affectionate title of his 2026 solo show, who happens to work like a professional.

“He did not paint Paris from a distance. He moved there — and paints the city Cortès and Blanchard would recognise, a century on.”

See the paintings

The heart of the work is the street scenes of Paris — the quartiers, the quais, the cafés and markets, through every season. Alongside them are the coasts of France, the light of the Mediterranean, and quiet still lifes from the studio.

View the Paris paintings
About Andrey Grin
Enquire about a work

Original paintings are available for purchase; prices are shared on request. To ask about a specific work, a commission, or availability, please use the contact form, and follow Andrey’s work on Instagram.