This painting was once part of a larger canvas depicting a Parisian brasserie or café-concert called Reichshoffen. In 1878, Manet cut this canvas in two and reworked the fragments as separate paintings: At the Café, which has been generously lent by the Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’, Winterthur, Switzerland, and Corner of a Café-Concert, which is in the National Gallery’s collection. The works have not been seen together since their last reunion in Winterthur in 2005.
At the Café shows visitors at one of the many spots for drinking and entertainment that flourished in popularity in Paris during the 1870s. These were bustling, dynamic centres of Parisian nightlife where the traditional social order could be briefly set aside: men and women of all classes mingled, watched performances, and drank alcohol, including a type of Alsatian beer known as bock. In this painting, a pair of fashionably-dressed patrons sit at a marble tabletop. The man, modelled by the lithographer Henri Guérard, casually leans on the shoulder of the woman to his right, based on the actor and model Ellen Andrée, who frequently sat for artists such as Manet, Degas, and Renoir. Their relationship appears ambivalent: squeezed together at the countertop, they also gaze out in oblique directions. To their left, an unidentified young woman sits in sharp profile, gazing vacantly across the table. This apparently informal arrangement of figures is typical of Manet’s scenes of café society, which give the impression of a spontaneous, snapshot view of urban life. A poster in the background, announcing a performance by the British Hanlon-Lees acrobatic group at the Folies-Bergère music hall, gestures towards the variety of other entertainments and amusements on offer in this rapidly changing metropolis.
Manet began to work on the painting in August 1877, before radically altering his plans and cutting it in two, completing each half separately. Although he reworked each painting as individual compositions, moments of continuity are clearly present across the two pictures. For example, the table of At the Café joins with that of Corner of a Café-Concert, while the shadows of the glasses extend over the two paintings. At the very left edge of Corner of a Café-Concert, the fingertips of the young woman closest to the window in At the Café are also just about visible. It is not certain why Manet took such drastic action in cutting the canvas - Gaston La Touche, a young artist, remembers the painting as being ‘full of splendid qualities’ - but it seems he couldn‘t resolve his dissatisfactions with the composition, particularly the placement of the central table. As he reworked the paintings, Manet further adjusted the backgrounds: technical analysis reveals an earlier composition of a female performer singing onstage, replaced by the curtained window in At the Café and the orchestra and dancer in Corner of a Café-Concert. In 1879, Manet exhibited the works in separate rooms at the Antwerp Salon, where they were praised by the Belgian and French press for their bold realism and lively composition.
In 1953, At the Café was bought by the Swiss patron and art collector Oskar Reinhart (1885-1965), whose painting collection is currently held at his former home ’Am Römerholz’. Reinhart first saw the painting in the collection of German collector Otto Gerstenberg in 1923 and immediately put it at the top of his list of desirable acquisitions. Reinhart tried on multiple occasions to convince Gerstenberg to sell the work to him. When Gerstenberg died in 1935, he left it to his daughter Margarete Scharf, who finally agreed to sell At the Café to Reinhart 18 years later for the record price of 350,000 Swiss francs - the highest price Reinhart ever paid for a painting.
