Corner of a Café-Concert

A waitress sets down one beer while holding two more, her bright face turned away from the crowd. Manet cut this scene from a larger canvas, and it caused a stir for showing a woman critics called indecent.

The story behind the painting

Manet was fascinated by the waitresses at the Brasserie de Reichshoffen, a Paris beer hall, and especially by how they could serve one customer without spilling the other beers in their hand. He believed scenes of public places needed a live model, so he asked the most skilled waitress to pose. She agreed only if her boyfriend came too, and he is the man in the blue smock with a pipe in the foreground. Manet worked in the Swedish painter Otto Rosen's studio on the Rue d'Amsterdam. Wikipedia dates the finished painting 1879, while Wikidata gives only the 1880s.

What to look for

In August 1878 Manet began a larger canvas, Café-Concert de Reichshoffen, then cut it in two. The left part became At the Café, and the right part became this painting. He added a strip of canvas about 7.5 inches wide on the right to centre the waitress, and the vertical line on the back of the man's smock marks the old edge. Behind them a dancer or singer in white is on stage, with fragments of a bass, a violin bow and a trombone. The waitress's head forms a pyramid with the two men's heads, and the man's raised hand is balanced by her beers.

Meaning and intent

The real subject is not the show but the waitress. The Reichshoffen was a brasserie à femmes, a new kind of beer hall of the late 1860s that hired women to serve, and such waitresses were commonly associated with prostitution. Manet chose instead to show her working, caught between transactions and not speaking to any customer. That deliberate ambiguity can be read as Manet engaging with the changing social life of his time. He also pulled foreground and background together so the place could be any brasserie, and gave it a modern feel.

Legacy

The painting was first shown in Manet's solo exhibition of 1880 at La Vie Moderne, then in Lyon in 1883 and in a posthumous show at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1884. Because it never went to the Salon, little period comment survives. What exists calls it well observed and rigorously rendered, yet critics disliked a waitress taken from the dubious circles of bohemia. Scholars still debate its link with Manet's The Waitress: some see this canvas as the study for it, others the reverse. It is now in the National Gallery, London.