Lot 128: JEAN-JOSEPH-LÉON FAURET FRENCH, 1863-1955 THE CAFÉ DE LA PAIX IN PARIS

Signed Leon Fauret (lower left)

oil on canvas

CATALOGUE NOTE

Haussmann's reurbanization of Paris, featuring new boulevards and redesigned neighborhoods, encouraged the rapid growth of cafes catering to everyone: from gloomy back rooms for working men in Montmartre to gilded halls for the well-heeled in the glitziest arrondissements. To a late nineteenth century American traveler, the best cafes were "all handsome... gorgeous with plate-glass, frescoes, and gildings" (James D. McCabe, Jr., Paris by Sunlight and Gaslight, Philadelphia, 1869, p. 75). Such establishments were magnets for upper class Parisians, wealthy artists, writers and tourists alike, and were clustered near the boulevards Capucines, the Italiens, and the Avenue de l'Opéra. Within a few blocks, coffee could be sipped at the Grand Café, the Café de Paris and at the jewel of Paris, the Café de la Paix, on the ground floor of the Grand Hotel. A particular favorite of moneyed guests staying in the rooms upstairs, the Café de la Paix invited one to sit for hours watching a fashionable procession (Fig. 1). Fauret's work depicts this mix of local and out-of-town patrons, as ladies and gentlemen dressed to impress one another, sit to catch up on gossip, or study a book (perhaps a tour guide of the next day's activities)--all while a phalanx of red-jacketed waiters stand at attention in the background. Among the potted palms and oriental rugs, one visitor to the Café in 1896 believed he had discovered "the center of the civilized world." Oscar Wilde agreed, choosing to begin his "The Sphinx without a Secret" here, where the good vermouth was only matched by the greater "splendor and shabbiness of Parisian life".

23 2/3 by 29 1/3 in.<br><br>60 by 100 cm