MANET, Edouard

In the fertile years that followed his D�jeuner and Olympia, Manet experimented very widely. Sometimes he focused on giving form to colour and movement in works like the Bullfight, at others he was inspired by contemporary events, such as the Battle of the “Kearsarge” and the “Alabama” off Cherbourg. This episode of the American Civil War made a considerable impression on public opinion. The work testified to Manet’s modernity, but was also an attempt to renew the theme of naval combat traditional in Dutch painting. It is, in fact, a battle between colour and light, where the blacks and the few dots of red enhance the tumultuous green of the waves.

In the winter of ¹⁸⁸¹⁄₈₂ Manet painted a picture that can stand as a summation of his art: A Bar at the Folies-Berg�re. Now exempt (as an award winner) from the jury process, he exhibited it at the 1882 Salon. Recent scholars have rightly been fascinated by the qualities of the painting and the intensity and diversity of Manet’s renewed analysis of part of the society he lived in.

The colours are rather subdued (which may be intended to convey the smoky somnolence of the pleasure palace), but on the other hand Manet gives us first-rate proof of his still-life talent in the foreground. The hard, cold quality of the white light globes is perfectly caught, they are like buttons on the canvas. Manet’s pastose brushwork creates a unified tapestry of colour correspondences and contrasts across the various spatial levels. Those levels themselves are intentionally confusing: most of what we see is a reflection in the bar mirror behind the woman. The laws of perspective are broken in a fashion that was a radical departure at the time. The woman’s back is reflected at an angle.

The Argenteuil (of vertical format) and the Boating (of horizontal format) are two open air genre portraits - rather than landscapes - which Manet painted in August 1874 at Argenteuil. The vertical-format painting is structurally the tighter thanks to its linear components, and is also the richest in motifs and forms. The sketchy horizontal-format picture uses large spaces of glowing colour. We do not know who the women in these paintings are; the man was either Manet’s brother-in-law, the Dutch painter Rodolphe Leenhoff, or Baron Barbier.

This painting, sent to the 1874 Salon, was a radical transformation in Manet’s painting. This was no longer a work invented in the studio on the model of a famous museum piece. It was, on the contrary, proof positive that Manet had joined the Monet-school.

Manet’s humour combines with his love of pretty women and their clothes in this painting. Humour is present since the subject Manet had chosen was a gigolo of prepossessing air seducing a much older woman under the ironic eye of the waiter. The admirably free composition was painted at the restaurant Du P�re Lathuille, and features the owner’s son as the gigolo. The woman was Mlle Judith French, a relative of Offenbach. Manet does wonders with their costumes, feasting himself on the details.

The style known now as bock was a dark, malty, lightly hopped ale first brewed in the 14th century by German brewers in the Hanseatic town of Einbeck. The style from Einbeck was later adopted by Munich brewers in the 17th century and adapted to the new lager style of brewing. Due to their Bavarian accent, citizens of Munich pronounced “Einbeck” as “ein Bock” (“a billy goat”), and thus the beer became known as “bock”.

Bock is historically associated with special occasions, often religious festivals such as Christmas, Easter or Lent. Bocks have a long history of being brewed and consumed by Bavarian monks as a source of nutrition during times of fasting.

This painting belongs to Manet’s many caf� scenes such as The Plum Brandy, the Corner of a Caf�-Concert, and the Bar in the Folies-Berg�re.

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century.

Nowhere is the novelty of Manet’s technique more apparent than in this strange portrait of the Creole woman, Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s “aging Infanta,” painted in 1862 when she was sick and half-paralysed. Her hard, swarthy face contrasts with her immense striped crinoline, which is treated broadly, almost sketchily, and the delicate embroidery on the curtain hung over the windows of the Rue Guyot studio that Manet occupied at that time.

Manet returned several times to painting Berthe Morisot’s languishing face and languishing attitudes. He clearly sought something more than the merely pictorial in this strange young woman, who was always dressed soberly in Manet’s favourite colours, black and white.

Manet returned several times to painting Berthe Morisot’s languishing face and languishing attitudes. He clearly sought something more than the merely pictorial in this strange young woman, who was always dressed soberly in Manet’s favourite colours, black and white. Her face inspired Manet, as witness the many rapidly brushed portraits without a trace of pentimenti.

The 1870s were rich in female models for Manet: the Brunette with Bare Breasts, the Blonde with Bare Breasts and the Sultana testify to it.

In this painting the canvas is barely covered by the thick oils spread here and there on the surface, while highlights of white or red-ochre render the flesh tone of the nude. It was painted in inspired improvisation.

This picture was painted during the summer of 1874, when Manet was working with Monet and Renoir at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine northwest of Paris. The influence of the two young Impressionist painters on Manet is evident in the subject matter - a celebration of the everyday pleasures of the middle class - and in the fact that Manet’s dark, Spanish palette has given way here to high-keyed hues. The flattened composition, in which the high viewpoint causes the water’s surface to rise up as a backdrop, is cut off at the edges of the canvas, reflecting Manet’s interest, shared with the Impressionists, in Japanese prints.

The Argenteuil (of vertical format) and the Boating (of horizontal format) are two open air genre portraits - rather than landscapes - which Manet painted in August 1874 at Argenteuil. The vertical-format painting is structurally the tighter thanks to its linear components, and is also the richest in motifs and forms. The sketchy horizontal-format picture uses large spaces of glowing colour. We do not know who the women in these paintings are; the man was either Manet’s brother-in-law, the Dutch painter Rodolphe Leenhoff, or Baron Barbier.

The 1870s were rich in female models for Manet: the Brunette with Bare Breasts, the Blonde with Bare Breasts and the Sultana testify to it.

In the fertile years that followed his D�jeuner and Olympia, Manet experimented very widely. Sometimes he focused on giving form to colour and movement in works like the Bullfight, at others he was inspired by contemporary events, such as the Battle of the “Kearsarge” and the “Alabama” off Cherbourg.

After painting his portrait of Berthe Morisot with a Bunch of Violets, Manet presented Berthe with this bouquet in affectionate homage to her tastes.

In the final phase of his career, already partly paralysed, Manet painted a number of small still-lifes, such as the Bundle of Asparagus, which became well known in Germany because Liebermann, a great admirer of Manet, once owned it. He also painted endless variations on the theme of flowers in vases. It is moving to look at these enchanting impressions of the loveliness of the natural world, given what we know of the advanced state of Manet’s illness when he painted them.

In this watercolour Manet repeats the effect applied in The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico: the soldiers aim parallel to the picture plane, putting their victims at no risk at all.

Claude Monet was the friend of Manet, the painter he most admired among the Impressionists.

Manet set up his easel in the open air to paint Claude Monet in his floating studio. Monet, now living in Argenteuil, had bought his studio-boat second-hand so that he could spend entire days out painting on the water, accompanied by his wife.

The three paintings, Argenteuil, Monet Painting on His Boat-Studio, and Boating, a veritable triptych, proved that Manet had entered the Impressionist ranks. He did so under Monet’s auspices and Monet’s influence. These three pictures share intense blue water, and a bold horizon-less composition.

Georges Benjamin Clemenceau (1841-1929) was a French journalist, physician and statesman. He was French prime minister twice, in 1906-09 and from November 1917-20. He was the senior French representative at the Versailles settlement after World War One.

The politician had little time to pose; but sketching in face, torso and crossed arms with lapidary indications and a ‘japoniste’ outline, Manet contrived to give physical expression to the hectoring energy and taunting humour of the ‘Tiger’ - the man credited by France with winning the First World War.

Manet liked the atmosphere of the caf�s and brasseries. A city-dweller, he relaxed after work in the caf� as others might in the garden. There he met his friends.

The present painting belongs to Manet’s Naturalist series. He creates his figures and details the scene in broad strokes of blue and brown, a harmony ho particularly affected.

This work was originally the right half of a painting of the Brasserie de Reichshoffen, begun in about 1878 and cut in two by Manet before he completed it.

In his fiftieth year, at the height of his talent, Manet became seriously ill. His left leg was amputated and he died a long and agonizing death. He continued painting as long as he was physically able. Retreating to Rueil, he spent his last summer almost entirely immobilized by locomotor ataxia. There he set himself under the shade of an acacia to paint his last landscape, House at Rueil, his touch lighter and more vibrant than ever.

Following Monet, Bazille, Boudin and Jongkind, who worked at Honfleur on the coast, Manet too began to take an interest in harbour scenes and ships at sea.

Manet’s Spanish period reached its culmination around 1862. For Manet, the attraction of Gipsy with a Cigarette was not just the costume and pose, but a natural bravado. Gypsy was a thoroughly modern subject: a liberated woman unafraid of taboos, colourful and spontaneous.

At the beginning of the 1880s Manet turned to the lush summer delights of gardens at Bellevue and Rueil, bringing a quality of humble observation to his work. The sectional views he painted were limited at every side, as if his horizon were literally becoming invisible.

In his fiftieth year, at the height of his talent, Manet became seriously ill. His left leg was amputated and he died a long and agonizing death. He continued painting as long as he was physically able. Retreating to Rueil, he spent his last summer almost entirely immobilized by locomotor ataxia. There he set himself under the shade of an acacia to paint his last landscape, House at Rueil, his touch lighter and more vibrant than ever.

The painting shows Monsieur and Madame Guillemet, Manet’s close friends, who ran a ‘haute couture’ salon in the faubourg Saint-Honor� in Paris. The painter’s customary preference for detached observation, and his aversion to unsubtly narrative content in a picture, were graphically expressed in the silent couple in this painting.

This painting was presented at the 1873 Salon. It is somewhat classical in manner, Hals-like in its virtuosity and relatively dark in tone. It won a “mention honorable” at the Salon.

The painting was widely identified as a French Alsatian patriot drinking his regional beer. The picture came to serve as a popular symbol of the recent loss of the Alsace-Lorraine region by France to the Germans and a liberal political symbol of national introspection. This association of Le Bon Bock with democratic ideals inspired Emile Bellot, a printmaker and the model for Manet’s corpulent beer drinker, to organize the Bon Bock Society in 1875. For almost fifty years this group hosted monthly dinners in and around Montmartre for its membership, which consisted mostly of artists, writers, and performers.

Manet’s “espagnolisme” reached fever pitch in the 1860s, any subject was good so long as it was Spanish. When a Spanish ballet troupe came to Paris, Manet was quick to paint Lola de Valence, posing her in the same position as Goya’s Duchess of Alba. Her magnificent costume, glittering with a thousand spangles, made an ideal subject for him.

The outcry provoked by this painting was greater than anything previously provoked by Courbet. Manet was surely echoing Courbet’s Young Ladies by the River Seine in presenting his prostitute with two dandies. The rowboat in the background and the fine still-life of discarded garments and picnic things both refer to Courbet’s painting. However, Manet was careful to pay tribute to the art of the past: the idea of combining nude and dressed figures he borrowed from Giorgione’s (or probably Titian’s) Pastoral Concert, and the poses are in part taken from an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi based on the Judgment of Paris by Raphael.

Manet had friends sit for him in modern dress, and the seated nude is Victorine Meurent, a favourite model of his for the past year.

It was Monet and Renoir who, each in turn, influenced Manet’s series of “ladies served on canap�s.” But this was a veritable interaction, with reciprocal exchanges and influences, for both Monet, in his Madame Monet on a Sofa (1871) and Madame Monet Reading (1872), and Renoir, in his Madame Monet Lying on a Sofa (1872), had deliberately modelled their paintings on Olympia, merely replacing her clothes. Manet, taking up the theme in their wake, did the same. Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa depicts his wife in full bourgeois regalia, but the arrangement of the torso and arms and even the flirtatiously placed hand were borrowed from his Olympia. This time, however, Manet’s picture was resolutely Impressionist, the more so for his lively use of pastel.

The use of pastel allowed Manet great contrasts of texture and colour, giving the picture an intensity and bloom that oil on canvas could not match. It was a medium to which Manet often returned, and his superlative technique resulted in numerous masterpieces.

The apogee of the pastel was the eighteenth century, and it had been relatively little practiced since, confined, for the most part, to landscape, in the work of Boudin, Delacroix, and Millet. Manet adopted it under the prompting of Degas, who had made a number of successful pastel portraits.

When Napoleon III married a Spanish bride, the resulting wave of ‘espagnolisme’ found in Manet a willing adept. This was the fashion, and Manet wanted to be a man of his time. However, despite his best efforts, his painting gave rise to successive scandals.

Two people had played a decisive role in the development of Manet’s Spanish period, which reached its culmination around 1862. First and foremost was a professional model, Victorine Meurent, who entered Manet’s life and work simultaneously, successively becoming the model of the present painting, and the nudes of D�jeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia. She was perfectly suited to modeling the unconventional feminine protagonists for whom Manet liked to set the scene. The other person was Manet’s friend Baudelaire, who emphasized the connection between this Spanish vein and modern reality.

Alphonse Maureau was a French Impressionist painter, a friend of Degas, Manet and Desboutin.

This painting is suggestive of Manet’s ironic delight in the behaviour of the gentlemen in tails and top hats, providing him with an opportunity to shine at black, and the gaiety of the colourful girls. The top edge of the painting emphasizes the cropped nature of this sectional view.

Manet is generally considered an important artist of the Realist tradition who influenced and was influenced by the Impressionist painters of the 1870s. He never exhibited with the Impressionists or adopted fully their ideas and procedures. His painting is famous for its painterly technique and his paintings and prints are known for new urban subject-matter. He had a short career, but his style evolved from early works characterized by dramatic light-dark contrasts and based on Spanish 17th-century painting to high-keyed, freely brushed compositions where the content was related to Symbolism.

At that time, with the imperial palace of the Tuileries still intact, society people would flock to the gardens to see and to be seen. A military band would be playing and people would meet there to talk, among them Manet himself, who often went there with his new friend the poet Charles Baudelaire.

Parts of Music in the Tuileries Garden are sketchily painted or indeed left unfinished. The crowd of people is only partly resolved into isolated groups engaged in conversation. People of the art scene would recognise some of those portrayed in the picture: Manet himself, Manet’s brother Eug�ne, the composer Jacques Offenbach, Charles Baudelaire and Th�odore Gautier.

In its compositional approach this painting opened up one of the various routes subsequently to be followed by the Impressionists.

In this painting, Manet was the first to record the unprecedented spectacle of his city and times, the poetry of modern life.

Manet is generally considered an important artist of the Realist tradition who influenced and was influenced by the Impressionist painters of the 1870s. He never exhibited with the Impressionists or adopted fully their ideas and procedures. His painting is famous for its painterly technique and his paintings and prints are known for new urban subject-matter. He had a short career, but his style evolved from early works characterized by dramatic light-dark contrasts and based on Spanish 17th-century painting to high-keyed, freely brushed compositions where the content was related to Symbolism.

This canvas was the most vociferously decried painting of the 1865 Salon. In fact, Manet has painted it in 1863 but had apparently not dared submit it in 1864. Olympia is another painting packed with allusions to past masterpieces, notably Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Goya’s Naked Maja. This whole tradition, from the odalisque to the black slave, continues (particularly with Ingres) throughout the nineteenth century, but what was surprising here was the absence of any exoticism, of either period or location, and the portrayal of a modern prostitute.

The painting of the period was not at all averse to flowers, and Courbet, Fantin-Latour, and Manet all painted many pictures with flowers in them. Among the best known bunches (this time wrapped in florist’s paper, like those that later Degas placed in the hands of his dancers as they took their bow) is the one being presented by a black servant to Olympia.

Olympia is today one of the glories of the Mus�e d’Orsay: an austere nude, devoid of artifice, eloquent and humane in its very plainness. But its forthright realism came as a shock to a public educated on the flirtatious curves of the eighteenth century.

This painting is the product of Manet’s 1872 trip to Holland, when the impact of Frans Hals was a great revelation. It was Hals, more then the Impressionists, who converted Manet to painting rapidly. He now put his “black” period behind him and embarked upon plein-air.

Madame Manet poses on the beach, and the intense black of her bonnet with its long strings defines the harmonies of the entire painting.

Victor Henri Rochefort, Marquis de Rochefort-Lu�ay (1830-1913) was a French writer and politician. In 1870 he became a member of the Government of National Defence, and he openly expressed sympathy with the Communards. In 1871 he was arrested and condemned under military law to imprisonment for life, then transported to New Caledonia. In 1874, he escaped on board an American vessel to San Francisco.

This painting is one of the several pastel portraits of women which Manet executed between 1879 and 1882. The decorative style of this work recalls the Italian portraits of the fifteenth century.

Thaulow received an academic artist education and later specialized in seascapes. One of the first painters in Norway to begin working en plein air, he created a gallery of images of the Scandinavian countryside that are subtle in mood, including masterly nocturnes such as the present canvas.

This painting was exhibited at the 1861 Salon, together with the Spanish Singer, which received a ‘mention honorable.’

St�phane Mallarm� (1842-1898) was a French poet who - with Paul Verlaine - was a founder and leader of the Symbolist movement. Most of his verse expresses an intellectual longing to transcend reality and find refuge in an ideal world, as in the dramatic poem L’Apr�s-midi d’un faune (1876; The Afternoon of a Faun), which inspired Claude Debussy’s famous prelude,

Manet probably met the poet at the salon of Nina de Callias. They were both entranced, and their friendship immediately became a close one.

Victorine Meurent was a professional model who entered Manet’s life and work simultaneously, as his mistress and model for, among others, the nudes of D�jeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia.

The two Morisot sisters, Edma and Berthe, were not only women of great character, they were also very talented painters. Manet met them in the Louvre, where they were copying. Both sisters were infatuated with the handsome painter. Berthe received from him not lessons but advice, and became his favourite model.

Manet returned several times to painting Berthe Morisot’s languishing face and languishing attitudes. He clearly sought something more than the merely pictorial in this strange young woman, who was always dressed soberly in Manet’s favourite colours, black and white. Her face inspired Manet, as witness the many rapidly brushed portraits without a trace of pentimenti. In the Repose, he effortlessly conveys the ardent soul of the young woman.

Manet’s “espagnolisme” reached fever pitch in the 1860s, any subject was good so long as it was Spanish. When a Spanish ballet troupe came to Paris, Manet painted the troupe as a whole, some dancers raising their arms in a bashful adumbration of dance.

This still-life depicts fruit on a table.

The Still-Life with Fish echoes a Chardin still-life, but juggles with the yellow of the lemon and the red of the fish.

This pastel is a study of the model for the waitress in the Bar at the Bar in the Folies Berg�re (Courtauld Gallery, London).

Seated in the foreground is Berthe Morisot. This is her impressive first appearance in Manet’s oeuvre. The composition has the hieratic frontality of Byzantine mosaics. Berthe is the unrivalled star, Manet having flattened the other characters in the background.

In this painting Manet drew on Goya’s Majas on Balcony.

Seated in the foreground is Berthe Morisot. She is the unrivalled star, Manet having flattened the other characters in the background. Beside her is the violinist Fanny Claus, their friend the landscape artist Antoine Guillemet, and, barely visible in the background, Manet’s son L�on.

This painting shows M�ry Laurent, the painter’s lover. It displays all the characteristics of Manet’s mature art: his spontaneity, freshness and generosity combined with rigorous composition, in which lines and curves stand out against a still-life of mirror, dressing table, flower-printed cretonne and wallpaper.

Victor Henri Rochefort, Marquis de Rochefort-Lu�ay (1830-1913) was a French writer and politician. In 1870 he became a member of the Government of National Defence, and he openly expressed sympathy with the Communards. In 1871 he was arrested and condemned under military law to imprisonment for life, then transported to New Caledonia. In 1874, he escaped on board an American vessel to San Francisco.

The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, derived from current affaires, was a work of considerable ambition. In it, Manet makes play with his sources, borrowing his composition from Goya’s The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, but adding the faces of the people peeping over the wall from Goya’s Quinta del Sordo. Manet’ soldier, however, show no desire to hit their target; they aim parallel to the picture plane, putting their victims at no risk at all.

After Manet’s death the canvas showing another version of the subject was cut up into smaller fragments, some of which were sold separately. Edgar Degas eventually purchased all the surviving fragments and reassembled them on a single canvas. The left-hand section of the canvas was probably cut off by Manet himself.

After the scandal of Olympia at the 1865 Salon, the following year had his Fifer rejected. he showed it to the public in 1867 in the private exhibition that he organized alongside the Exposition Universelle. The Fifer was dismissed as naive and derisively compared to a playing card by people who failed to appreciate the references to Vel�zquez, whose work Manet had recently been admiring in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Only the young journalist �mile Zola defended the painting which he had seen in the artist’s studio.

In this painting Manet contrived a bold synthesis of Spanish painting and Japanese prints. The unprecedented conception of space that resulted had a profound impact on Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Gauguin.

Manet painted this picture during a trip to Italy. He was thrilled by this typical Venetian view, with is reflective waters agitated by the passing gondolas and its countless oscillations of light and shadow.

The Luncheon in the Studio is perhaps Manet’s finest painting in this period. It is a portrait of L�on Leenhoff, said to have been born to Manet and his future wife Suzanne Leenhoff before they were married. The young man was sixteen years old when thus represented, and his mother continued to present him as her younger brother. The name of Vermeer has been cited in relation to this picture, in which Manet contrived an elegant harmony between the distribution of light and the delicately contrasted yellows and blacks.

Manet’s special friendship with Monet, and his new desire to paint from nature, came together in the picture The Monet Family in Their Garden. Monet recounted what happened that day in his Argenteuil garden. Renoir appeared, and, attracted by the atmosphere, decided to paint the same subject, Camille Monet and her Son in Their Garden. It is interesting to compare the two works painted that day. We see that, though influenced by his juniors, Manet remained Manet. His painting seems both more carefully thought out and more ambitious than Renoir’s, and, though he breaks new ground in his brushstrokes and variety of colours, he remains allusive, lacking the spontaneity shown by Renoir. But then, Renoir was practiced at this kind of painting, whereas Manet was the beginner.

This painting depicts an unconventional young woman on the background of a fashionable caf�.

This picture belongs to Manet’s “Naturalist” series of paintings. He depicts a prostitute, lost in melancholy daydreams. She neither lights her cigarette nor touches her brandy-soaked plum. This painting was the first of Manet’s many caf� scenes, which followed by At the Caf�, the Corner of a Caf�-Concert, and his absolute masterpiece, the Bar in the Folies-Berg�re.

In this painting, Manet turned aside from urban truth to investigate the representation of speed. Flecks of swirling colour advance through the light, and the gaudy spectacle is captured with photographic instantaneousness.

This painting is in reality a genre portrait of Manet’s model Victorine and the daughter of his friend Alphonse Hirsch, in whose Paris garden near the Gare Saint-Lazare the picture was painted.

The painting represents Madame Manet and her son, Leon Koella.

Charming and seductive, Manet loved women rather as he loved flowers, and was always surrounded by willing models. For a while, he contended himself with portraying his wife in various poses, in Reading and in the pastel Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa.

Jean-Baptiste Faure (1830-1914) was a celebrated French operatic baritone and an art collector of great significance. He made history by creating several important operatic roles written by such prominent composers as Giacomo Meyerbeer, Giuseppe Verdi and Ambroise Thomas. They included the leading baritone parts in L’Africaine, Don Carlos and Hamlet (in 1865, 1867 and 1868 respectively).

The 1870s were rich in female models for Manet: the Brunette with Bare Breasts, the Blonde with Bare Breasts and the Sultana testify to it. The transparency of the gauze over the Sultana’s forms is remarkable.

Manet detested the countryside, and found landscapes futile unless animated by some justificatory event. When he painted a view of the Trocad�ro, it was on the occasion of the World Fair.

Still-lifes have a great importance in Manet’s work. They account for a fifth of his oeuvre, quite apart from the many pictures within pictures, such as the dress and basket in the foreground of the D�jeuner or the bouquet in Olympia. All of Manet’s most important works contain a magisterial still-life, from the desk and passe-partout in the Portrait of �mile Zola, the arms and carefully laid table of Luncheon in the Studio to the mugs in The Waitress or the oranges in the Bar in the Folies-Berg�re.

In this painting, Manet shows an apparently fleetingly captured moment in one of the caf�-concerts. The caf�-concerts were large coffee houses with a changing program of entertainment. These were especially popular with Parisians.

The busy young waitress is gazing out from the painting in the direction of the onlooker. She has just served the beer that has been set down in the bottom left-hand corner of the picture to the man smoking a pipe. In her left hand she is still holding two more glasses for other customers.

Another painting, the Corner of a Caf�-Concert, executed at the same time and showing the same figures, can be seen in the National Gallery, London.