The café where Impressionism argued itself into being
Before Impressionism had a name, it had a table. In the late 1860s, Édouard Manet and his circle met at the Café Guerbois, on what was then the Grande-Rue des Batignolles, today part of avenue de Clichy. Thursday evenings were the fixture, but the arguing was daily.
The cast reads like a museum wing waiting to happen: Manet presiding, Degas sharpening epigrams, Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Bazille when they could afford the omnibus, Pissarro up from the suburbs, the critic and novelist Émile Zola taking notes that would become ammunition. Paris called them, half mockingly, le groupe des Batignolles. Henri Fantin-Latour painted the scene’s formal portrait in 1870, A Studio at Les Batignolles, now at the Musée d’Orsay: Manet at the easel, the future of painting standing awkwardly around him in dark coats.
Why here? Because the Batignolles were cheap, bright and new. The quarter had been annexed to Paris only in 1860, rents suited painters without buyers, the light suited painters without studios, and the café suited everyone. What the academy refused to hang, the Guerbois debated at full volume: painting outdoors, painting modern life, painting fast enough to catch weather.
The arguments were not polite. One of them, between Manet and the critic Duranty in 1870, ended in an actual duel, swords, in the forest of Saint-Germain; both survived, honour and friendship intact. Four years later, many of the same voices mounted the independent exhibition that earned them, from a sneering reviewer, the name Impressionists.
The café itself is long gone. The avenue, the market and the appetite are not. Our Batignolles walk pauses where the quarrel lived, with something good to eat in hand, because that is how the group would have wanted it.