Corner of a Café-Concert

By the late 1870s Paris had filled with café-concerts, smoky halls where you paid nothing at the door, bought a beer, and watched a singer work the stage while the crowd talked over her. Manet went often in these years, sketching on the spot as his health failed. This corner catches it all at once. A waitress swings past with two full glasses, not watching where she pours. In front of her a workman in a blue smock sits with his pipe, half-turned, and behind them a dancer in a white cap is up on the lit stage. Nobody is quite watching anybody. Manet cut this scene from a larger canvas he had started and never resolved, which is why the waitress seems to stride in from outside the frame. The blue smock was ordinary street clothing then, the dress of a man who worked with his hands.