Manet Cut This Painting in Half 150 Years Ago. Now, the Two Sides Are Back Together for a Rare Reunion
The two resulting artworks, “At the Café” and “Corner of a Café-Concert,” both bear witness to vibrant social scenes from 19th-century Paris
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A reunion is taking place in room 41 of London’s National Gallery. Among early Impressionist masterpieces like Claude Monet’s The Gare St. Lazare and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Umbrellas, two paintings by Édouard Manet that were initially part of one panoramic canvas are being reunited for only the second time since the 1870s.
The story of how one painting became two—At the Café and Corner of a Café-Concert, both completed around 1878—begins at Brasserie Reichshoffen, a café in Paris’ Montmartre neighborhood. Cafés were vibrant social hubs of 19th-century Paris where patrons from different walks of life listened to music, socialized and drank in close proximity to one another.
Manet was enthralled by the motion and chaos of these scenes, but he particularly enjoyed capturing the small moments of stillness that came to employees and visitors alike. A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), perhaps the most famous café painting by Manet, captures a barmaid resting her hands on the marbled counter. While her eyes appear out of focus, a mirror behind the bar reveals the scene in her field of view: dozens of customers packed into a dense, sociable clump beneath glowing chandeliers. A top-hatted man gazes at the barmaid as if she were another selection among the beer, champagne and oranges on the counter.
Roughly eight years earlier, Manet made his first attempt at this sweeping sort of café masterpiece. In 1874, he began to paint a scene of the Brasserie Reichshoffen on a large canvas. Unlike his paintings of military scenes or upper-class life of the 1860s, the new piece captured the dramas of everyday life.
But Manet became dissatisfied with the composition of the large work and opted to cut the canvas in two. Over the next few years, he refined each half into more concise, if slightly less ambitious, depictions of the same café: At the Café and Corner of a Café-Concert.
“This is not an accident of history,” Christopher Riopelle, a curator at the National Gallery, tells the London Times’ David Sanderson. “Manet chose to cut them and make two separate compositions. He must have decided that it was not working on this large scale.”
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In Corner of a Café-Concert, a waitress with two mugs of amber beer in one hand looks out into the distance—presumably at the same chaos that Manet would expertly depict in the mirror of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. In the foreground, a man leaning on the marble counter smokes a pipe, while a crowd of other patrons and a bass player blur beneath a yellow-haired dancer.
Viewed alongside Corner of a Café-Concert, At the Café seems to show the other side of the same bar. This time, there are no waitresses or dancers. But it takes little imagination to trace the gaze of the man in the top hat, distracted from the women he’s sitting between, to subjects on the other side of the room.
While both paintings are well regarded, Manet’s contemporaries struggled to understand his decision to separate them. His friend, the painter Gaston La Touche, claimed that the original canvas “had many great qualities, and the painter’s weak points were not in evidence,” per Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred.
Manet’s reasons remained elusive. As if to demonstrate their interchangeability, he physically toyed with the canvases, removing a strip from At the Café and adding it to Corner of a Café-Concert before removing the strip again and reattaching it to the right side of At the Café.
But his conviction that the two should be kept apart remained strong. When the two paintings of the same café were exhibited at the Triennial Salon in Antwerp in 1879, they were shown in separate rooms.
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A French collector bought the two paintings together, but following his death in 1887 (four years after Manet died), they were separated again. The National Gallery bought Corner of a Café-Concert in 1924, while the Swiss collector Oskar Reinhart bought At the Café in 1953.
The two paintings were not reunited in exhibition until 2005, when the National Gallery agreed to lend Corner of a Café-Concert to Reinhart’s gallery in Winterthur, Switzerland. Twenty years later, the institution has opted to allow At the Café to travel to London. It arrived at the National Gallery after a showing at the Courtauld Gallery’s “Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection” exhibition.
Unlike the Triennial Salon in Antwerp, the National Gallery has opted to hang the paintings “quite close together” in room 41, while still treating them as independent pictures, Riopelle tells the London Times.
“We have to honor [Manet’s] aesthetic decision,” he adds. “Many artists’ minds are incomprehensible to the rest of us.”
