Café Wepler

Café Wepler at the Cleveland Museum of Art depicts the famous café in the Place de Clichy in Montmartre — a democratic establishment that served the neighborhood's diverse population of artists, writers, working people, and bourgeois residents with impartial hospitality. Vuillard's relationship to the Batignolles and Clichy neighborhoods was long and personal: he had grown up near there, maintained a studio and apartment in the 17th arrondissement for much of his career, and frequented the cafés of the area throughout his adult life. The Wepler in particular was a gathering place for the kind of mixed Parisian social world he documented across his career — not the fashionable boulevards of the 8th arrondissement or the bohemian Montmartre celebrated by Toulouse-Lautrec but the solid, middle-class civic life of the outer arrondissements. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds several of his works, acquired through the institution's systematic collecting of French Post-Impressionist painting in the mid-twentieth century.

Vuillard constructs the café interior through his characteristic dissolution of figure and setting into an interlocking pattern of tone and colour. Seated customers merge with tables, chairs, and walls in a shimmer of warm and cool tones, the specific forms of individuals subordinated to the overall atmospheric effect of the populated room.