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Cafes were born in the century of the Enlightenment (the 18th century). In Paris, “the salons of intelligence and the twin assets of social and intellectual distinction. Wine (still or sparking champagne, Tokay or Rhine valley wine) is rarely drunk here.” Cafes were not depicted by master painters, most of whom still had little interest in genre scenes. From the second half of the 19th century, cafes became more democratic and, under many different names (cabaret, wine merchant, mastroquet), attracted people from every social and professional rank. Anyone could be found in this type of space. A place of light, warmth and sociability, the cafe became a social melting-pot. Between the cafe walls, ‘people’ could talk, play, drink and smoke, usually in a kind of sociable anonymity.

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1.  Cafes and cafes concerts became a central point of urban life. Once more, it was Haussmann’s Paris which gave them this importance, as the large pavements of the boulevards, glowing under gaslights at night, allowed cafés and restaurants to flourish. In his Women on the Terrace of a Cafe in the Evening (Femmes à la terrasse d’un café le soir), Degas portrays “prostitutes, wilted, faded creatures who, sweating vice, cynically go over the events of the day” (Georges Rivière, art critic, 1877).

 

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3. For many customers, cafés provided a substitute family and a way of killing time, like the drunken woman asleep on her neighbor's shoulder in At Cafe Le Bouchon by Edouard Manet, himself a regular of all sorts of Paris cafés.

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5. This man, leaning against the table, seems like a fixture of the bar. We can see behind him a pile of four china saucers set before a glass of absinthe. This painting is a manifesto against the liberalisation of licenced establishments, set out in the law of 17th July 1880, when this extremely potent drink - absinthe’s alcohol content was labelled as 70% - was ravaging lives, particularly among the working classes, in the assommoirs of the time (Emile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir referred to the type of bars frequented by poor labourers). The fall in the price of absinthe – a glass of “green fairy” cost less than a glass of wine – coupled with the phylloxera crisis, would cause French absinthe consumption (for a population of 41 million) to rocket from 700,000 litres in 1874 to 36 million litres in 1910. The fightback against absinthe consumption would begin in earnest with a sharp rise in wine production at the start of the 20th century. Believed to cause madness and criminality amongst its drinkers, absinthe was finally banned in 1915, through the combined efforts of the Academy of Medicine, anti-alcohol leagues and the very powerful winegrowers’ unions.

 

 

10. On the 23rd October 1888, Paul Gauguin arrived at Van Gogh’s home in Arles. Night Café at Arles, Madame Ginoux is one of Gaugin’s personal interpretations of Van Gogh’s work. We see none of the desolation apparent in Van Gogh’s version of the scene. The anonymous visitors seem to shrink behind the imposing figure of Madame Ginoux , the landlady. Gaugin only dealt with the hidden side of life, preferring to paint in a way that appealed to the imagination as he also demonstrates in Grape Harvest at Arles (or Human Anguish). Paul Gaugin shows us “this [very] café that Vincent likes a lot and I somewhat less. I like it when others are there, but I still feel apprehensive. It’s a question of education and such things cannot be undone” (Paul Gauguin, Letter to Emile Bernard). While Gaugin’s painting fails to show the same uninhibited expressionism as that of Van Gogh, it portrays a person sleeping and prostitutes, both typical customers of all-night cafés.

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12. For Munch, Paris was “too noisy” and “too expensive”. At the beginning of 1890, like other artists and writers, he fled the cholera epidemic which was raging in the city and moved into a small room at the Hôtel Belvedere in the suburb of Saint-Cloud. This scene is very likely set in the Belvedere’s own “tavern”. A man is shown having a drink at the bar. He looks solitary, sad and melancholic: doubtless just like Munch, who was badly affected by the sudden death of his father just a few months earlier…

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14-15. These Cezanne’s figures give the impression of balance and tranquillity.

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16-17. In Paul Cezanne’s The Card Players, to be found in the Musée d'Orsay and also in Qatar*, the bottle, on which the light is playing, becomes the central axis of the composition, separating the space into two symmetrical areas and thus highlighting the opposition of the card players. Cezanne used as models peasants whom he had seen on the Jas du Bouffan family estate, near Aix-en-Provence. The two men, in Sunday best, have not taken off their hats. They seem to be frozen and concentrated on their game. Although impossible to identify, the cafe seems to be of the most basic sort, featuring a wooden table covered with a short tablecloth, ordinary chairs, a simple bottle of wine. Only a mirror on the wall adds to the decor.

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20. The dinner and the diner is a recurring theme among artists of the so-called “Belle Époque”. Whether in a café or restaurant, all have tried it. With characters joyful, miserable, provocative, drunken, full or ravenous, all have skilfully covered this slice of life. The thing that strikes us about the couple here is the feeling of solitude. They’re there together, but their eyes never meet: each is in their own world; the other doesn’t count or, if they do, it’s only because one of the characters hopes to take advantage of the other in some way. Two wordless stories unfold.

A frontier is created by the empty space between the tables: to the right, the large, lusty and full-looking bourgeois gentleman is waiting for his bill, while to the left, the thin and hungry lorette [a term for young women of light morals of the time] waits, with little conviction, for someone to buy her dinner. [Editor’s note: We can easily imagine this woman casting a look of disdain at her neighbour.] … “Le Riche” was one of the great Boulevard cafés and, like all of them, also a restaurant. The literati, newspapermen, painters, musicians and other great minds met there… Nights here could take a naughty turn, with private rooms upstairs (Source: Beaussant Lefevre auction catalogue).

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*  Several versions of The Card Players were produced by Cezanne: five copies are conserved at the Musée d'Orsay, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. As for the fifth known copy, it was bought privately by the Qatari royal family for 228 million Euros, making it the most expensive painting in 2012! This sad record has been beaten. This version and those of the Musée d'Orsay and the Courtauld Institute are the only three to feature wine and just two characters. The Qatar version was finished before that of the Musée d'Orsay, and is two and a half times bigger (97 x 130 cm vs. 47.5 x 57 cm).