This painting was once the left half to the National Gallery’s Corner of a Café-Concert, together a large horizontal composition depicting the Parisian brasserie or café-concert Reichshoffen which Manet cut in two circa 1878. Au Café has been generously lent by the Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland. The works have not been seen together since their last reunion in Winterthur in 2005, making this display the first of its kind in London.
Au Café shows visitors to one of the many café-concerts popular in Paris during the 1870s. In the crowded café, two women and one man sit at a marble tabletop. The man, identified as the lithographer Henri Guérard by Manet’s brother-in-law Léon Leenhoff, is fashionably dressed in a top hat and carries a cane. He casually leans on the shoulder of the woman to his right, actress Ellen Andrée, who frequently modelled for artists such as Manet, Degas and Renoir. To his left sits an unidentified young woman, her hands resting on the counter, gazing vacantly across the table. The beers in front of the couple suggest the establishment to be a brasserie. Many of these Alsatian breweries opened their doors in Paris after the Franco-Prussian war in 1870/71, serving beer known as ‘bock’ to Alsatian refugees in the French capital. In the background of the picture, partially visible by daylight pouring through and in reverse, is the bottom of a poster announcing the ‘do mi sol do’ show of the British Hanlon-Lees acrobatic group at the Folies-Bergère music hall in May 1878. Stuck to the outside window, the poster advertises the performance to the brasserie’s passersby.
Manet began to work on the larger painting in August 1877 but radically altered his plans and cut it – for reasons unknown – in two, completing each half separately. Although he reworked each painting as individual compositions, it is still clear that they are two halves of the same picture. For example, the table of Au Café joins with the table on the left in Corner of a Café-Concert, and the shadows of the glasses and carafes continue over the two paintings. At the very left edge of the National Gallery picture, the fingertips of the young woman closest to the window in the Reinhart painting are just visible. Gaston La Touche, a young artist, remembers that while Manet was in the rue de Saint-Pétersbourg studio:
‘Manet was working on a café-concert scene that he took it into his head one day to cut in half. I couldn’t help regretting it, as did many of his friends. The printmaker H. Guérard had posed for him, as had the painter Goeunette, and others too; the whole thing was full of splendid qualities, and the artist’s shortcomings were barely noticeable.’
After cutting the painting in two, the artist exhibited both works at the triennial Antwerp Salon (10 August–5 October 1879), where they were shown in separate rooms. They were generally received favourably by the Belgian and French press (although one Belgian critic did say he would not hang it even above his kitchen sink), praising Manet’s bold realism and lively composition. Both paintings were subsequently exhibited in Marseille at the end of 1880 for the second to last time, before only being united again in Winterthur in 2005.
In 1953 Au Café was bought by 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, after which he immediately put it at the top of his list of desirable acquisitions. After this first visit to Gerstenberg in Berlin, Reinhart tried on multiple occasions (though unsuccessfully) to convince Gerstenberg to sell the work to him. When the latter died in 1935, he left it to his daughter Margarete Scharf. The Second World War caused Reinhart to cut all ties with Germany, and he did not see the painting again until 1949. In 1953, Scharf finally agreed to sell Au Café to Reinhart for the record price of 350,000 Swiss francs – the highest price ever paid by Reinhart for a painting.
