At the Café

In 1878 Manet started a large canvas of the Brasserie Reichshoffen, a café-concert on the boulevard Rochechouart at the foot of Montmartre. He could not make the composition work, and before finishing it he cut it into two unequal pieces. This is the left-hand part. The right-hand part became Corner of a Café-Concert, now in the National Gallery in London. Two people from his circle posed here, the actress Ellen Andrée in the small felt hat, and the engraver Henri Guérard in the top hat beside her. The poster on the window behind them is seen from inside, so its letters run backwards. It advertises the Hanlon-Lees, a celebrated troupe of acrobats. Both pieces were shown in Antwerp in 1879 and bought by the same Marseille collector, Étienne Barroil, and they went separate ways after his death in 1887. Oskar Reinhart acquired this one in 1953, and in 2005 the two canvases hung side by side in Winterthur for the first time in 125 years.