The Café-Concert

A man at ease, a woman lost in thought with a cigarette, a waitress drinking her beer: three people side by side in a Paris café, each looking a different way. Manet makes a casual evening feel like a scene of separation.

The story behind the painting

Manet often painted café scenes of Parisian social life at the end of the nineteenth century. The setting of this one has been identified as the Brasserie Reichshoffen on the boulevard Rochechouart. Manet shows men and women in the new brasseries and cafés of Paris, an alternate view of modern city life, and he claimed he was painting sincere works. Wikipedia dates the painting 1879, while the Wikidata record gives 1878.

What to look for

Three central figures form a triangle, yet each is turned in a different direction. The waitress drinks a beer. The woman at the table smokes a cigarette and seems subdued. The man looks at ease as he watches the show, and the singer known as La Belle Polonaise appears reflected in the mirror at the back. The figures are not sharply outlined but modelled with brushstrokes, the colours laid directly on the canvas in loose, repeated strokes rather than in glazes over a dark ground.

Meaning and intent

The supposedly casual scene is hinted to be one of separation. The man shows confidence because, unlike women, men could visit cafés without feeling insecure; the women in such scenes risked how they would be seen and judged. Though it was posed and finished in a studio, the painting looks freshly observed, and it turns its back on conventional composition, letting the brushwork carry both the faces and the mood.

Legacy

The original belongs to The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. A reproduction was featured in Off the Wall, an open-air exhibition on the streets of Baltimore, displayed at the CFG Community Bank in Fell's Point. The reproductions were printed on weather-resistant vinyl with a description and a QR code, following a concept begun by the National Gallery in London in 2007 and brought to the United States by the Detroit Institute of Arts.