PARISIANS ARE OFTEN caricatured as blasé yet, when it comes to their city’s cultural treasures, they can be disarmingly sentimental. New Yorkers may dismiss the Empire State Building as kitsch, but Parisians have an unironic love for the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. There is likewise widespread devotion to the capital’s artisanal past: Many wouldn’t dream, for example, of getting their brass door hardware anywhere but the 19th-century A La Providence on Rue du Faubourg St.-Antoine, or their pencils anywhere but the 136-year-old art supply store Sennelier. Such loyalty to the city’s institutions has a relatively young champion these days: the 38-year-old illustrator Marin Montagut. Raised in Toulouse by antiques dealer parents, he was enamored as a child with images of Paris’s Belle Époque and dreamed of moving to the capital to make art; at 19, he arrived with a single suitcase, a set of watercolors and a few sable brushes.

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