Au café, dit l'Absinthe

Jean Béraud (1849-1935)

The genre scenes by Jean Béraud provide a delicate portrait of Parisian society. These compositions are a veritable urban chronicle made from on-the-spot sketches. They describe daily life in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century—on the boulevards, in cafés and theaters, along elegant walkways, in fashionable restaurants and at the racetrack—leisure selected from the vast catalog of pleasures pertaining to what is known as the Belle Époque. Twenty or so of the artist’s compositions are known, almost all of them painted between 1908 and 1910 on the theme of cafés. An example is the painting entitled Au café, dit l’Absinthe (At the So-called Absinthe Café), made in 1909 and showing two people at a table. A man is getting ready to drink a glass of absinthe as a woman waits with bored resignation. The careful attention paid to details, the setting where the figures are found and their clothing show the precision with which Jean Béraud observed and depicted this scene.