Édouard Manet
Le Café (Deuxième planche)
1874
Pen autolithograph on thin wove paper imprinted verso 26.2 x 33.3 cm (26.9/27,7 x 35.6/36 cm) Signed 'Manet' on the plate lower right. - A reproduced drawing by Bertall verso, titled"Plus de Carneval". An essay on both sides of the drawing titled "Le Troubadour carnavalesque" and dated "Paris, 21 février 1874". According to Harris, there is no edition. The Ingelheim exhibition catalogue mentions four further prints in Baltimore, Boston, the National Gallery, Washington D.C. (former collection Haviland) and in Berlin Staatliche Museen, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett. Very rare. - The sheet irregularly cut.
Manet used one of his pen and ink drawings ("A Café Interior", today Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA) from 1869 as a reference for this pen autolithograph, to which he added several billiard players in the left background for the print version five years later. In all likelihood, the depicted café is the Café Guerbois, located in no. 11 Grand Rue des Batignolles in Paris, an important meeting point for artists, notably painters and writers of the era. Manet and his followers socialised here regularly, as did many other impressionists such as Edgar Degas and Auguste Renoir. Apart from this pen autolithograph, Manet created a version with the same motif as a brush autolithograph (Harris 67; Guérin 80 "Le Café (Première planche)") in the same year, of which three prints are known.
For this lot, special conditions are applicable (legend "D" according to the conditions of sale).
Provenance
Formerly Collection Rouart, Paris; Klipstein & Kornfeld, Bern, Auction 90, 17 May 1958, Nachtrag; Christie's London, Important Modern and Contemporary Prints, 2 Dec. 1987, Lot 547; Graphisches Kabinett Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner, Bremen (1988); Klaus J. Jacobs Collection, Zurich
Exhibitions
Ingelheim 1977 (Villa Schneider), Edouard Manet. Das graphische Werk, Nachtrag zum Katalog: Errata et addenda, cat. no. 64 with illus.