Piece №006
French Impressionist café painting
Historical context
Corner of a Café-Concert is one of two surviving fragments of a single painting Manet began in 1878 of the Brasserie de Reichshoffen on the Boulevard Rochechouart in Paris. Manet cut the canvas in half before he had finished it; the left fragment is in the Reinhart collection in Winterthur, this right fragment was completed separately and now hangs in the National Gallery, London.
Paris in the late 1870s ran on café-concerts — cheap brasseries with a small stage at one end, where customers drank, smoked, and listened to a working singer or instrumentalist between rounds. The Reichshoffen sat near Place de Clichy, in the same arrondissement as the Folies-Bergère Manet would paint three years later. Coffee, beer, and wine were served from the same long counter.
Manet’s handling is the late style: confident, broad, the figures resolved with wet-into-wet strokes rather than careful modeling. The waitress — the only fully realized figure — was painted from a real serveuse who came to his studio. The seated woman drinking is a hired model; the bearded man smoking is the printmaker Henri Guérard, Manet’s friend.
The piece entered the National Gallery in 1924 through the Lane Bequest. Before that it was in private hands for forty years. The Reinhart fragment in Winterthur shows the missing left half — a different waitress, more of the bar — but the two were never reunited and there is no plan to do so.
The file is a high-resolution scan of the National Gallery’s open-access photograph of the canvas, 3394 × 4226 px. The painted surface is small (97 × 78 cm in the original), and the file carries cleanly to 16 × 20 inch print at native pixel density. We recommend the middle size; the painting was made to be read at standing-figure scale and the brushwork softens at very large hangs.
Catalog
| Artist | Édouard Manet French, 1832–1883 |
|---|---|
| Title | Corner of a Café-Concert |
| Year | c. 1878–1880 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Original size | 97 × 78 cm |
| Holding | The National Gallery, London (NG3858) |
| License | Public Domain |
| Archive № | CA-006 |
Print specifications
The shelf-scale hang. Matte fine-art paper, slim warm-toned frame. The waitress reads as the focal point regardless of size.
Approaching the canvas’s actual scale. The seated woman’s face and the trombone bell both gain presence. Generous mat, walnut frame.
Pushable for a large wall, but the late Manet brushwork begins to look schematic at this enlargement. We’d stay at 16 × 20.
Source statement
Digital source: The National Gallery, London (NG3858), open-access photograph of the canvas. Released into public domain by the artist’s death (1883, France, life + 70).
Original work: Édouard Manet (1832–1883), Corner of a Café-Concert, oil on canvas, c. 1878–1880. National Gallery, London, NG3858.
Restoration notes. Color values preserved from the National Gallery photograph. Mild contrast lift to compensate for photographic flatness; no retouching applied to the painted surface.
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