A Confeitaria Gloppe

Beraud painted this in 1889, the year Paris threw open its Exposition Universelle and Eiffel's new tower drew crowds across the river. His own subject was quieter and just as modern: the pleasure of a fashionable afternoon. The Gloppe was a chic pastry shop near the Rond-point of the Champs-Elysees, the kind of place a well-dressed woman went to be seen tasting something sweet. He fills the room with mirrors in gilded frames that throw the light of the avenue back inside, a waiter pouring sweet wine, children weighing up which cake to point at. The shop was real and it was thriving. It kept its doors on the Champs-Elysees until the years of the First World War, then closed for good.