Café Wepler

Café Wepler, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, depicts the famous café in the Place de Clichy in Montmartre where Vuillard and his circle frequently gathered. Painted around 1910, the work belongs to Vuillard's extended engagement with the social spaces of Paris — the theatres, cafés, and salons where his bourgeois world conducted its leisure. The Wepler was a democratic institution, frequented by artists, writers, and neighbourhood regulars alike, and Vuillard renders its interior with the same attentive pattern-consciousness he brought to the domestic interiors that made his reputation.

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.