Das Café-Concert

By the late 1870s Paris was full of cafe-concerts, noisy halls where you could drink and watch a singer for the price of a beer, a cheap new pleasure of the rebuilt city. Manet painted one around 1878 and packed three different Parisians against a single marble counter. A top-hatted gentleman and a working woman in a bonnet sit side by side without acknowledging each other, both staring off past us, while behind them a waitress gulps her own drink and a singer performs, caught in a mirror's reflection. Manet often worked in the cafes along the boulevards, sketching the regulars over his own glass. The blue-grey haze behind the figures is the tobacco smoke of the room.