Place de l’Opéra, Café de la Paix by Edouard Cortès
In the mid-nineteenth century, Emperor Napoleon III commissioned Georges-Eugène Haussmann to undertake an urban renovation program in Paris, beautifying the city center and aggrandizing its appearance. Consequently, street scenes of the French capital became much more popular among collectors. Another result of this program was that the city’s new opera house, the Palais Garnier, became one of the centerpieces of the “new” Paris.
Architectural historian Christopher Mead writes that the Haussmann renovations, including the new opera house, “set the civic stage on which bourgeois Paris could act out its rituals of public display”. Edouard Cortès (1882 – 1969) used the opera house, by then world-famous, as the backdrop of many paintings. Meanwhile, the foreground is populated by horse-drawn streetcars, mothers with their children, bakers’ apprentices, and fashionable pedestrians walking in front of the warm, welcoming light coming from the famous Café de la Paix.
Given its proximity to the opera, the café was frequented by composers, musicians, writers, and artists. Other patrons included the well-off Parisians who would socialize, see these artists, and, of course, be seen themselves. In his 1914 travelogue, the American writer Burton Holmes commented that the Café de la Paix is a “focal point of Parisian existence.” He further wrote that patrons at the café would “rubber”, a euphemism for craning their necks to get a look at whoever walked in and whoever may be passing by the terrasse: “[W]hat would be the use of all the pretty hats and gowns and high-heeled shoes and dainty hosiery if men were not gallant enough to pay attention to the exquisite display?”
Place de l’Opéra, Café de la Paix by Edouard Cortès will be on display at the Rehs Galleries booth at the Newport Show starting July 24th.