Au Café (Couple in a Café)
Federico Zandomeneghi
c. 1885
Pastel on paper
44,5 x 54 cm
71 x 82 x 8,5 cm
Acquisition year 1984-1993
Catalogue N.
Inv.
Provenance
Exhibitions
Bibliography
Crammed into the narrow space between the table and the wall, a couple are engaged in private conversation. The woman appears to be deeply gratified by the man’s words, as her eyes glisten with emotion in her pale face.
After studying at the academies of Venice and Milan, Federico Zandomeneghi moved to Florence in 1862 and was immediately introduced into the group of the Macchiaioli painters by his old friend Giuseppe Abbati.
In June 1874, determined to renew his figurative vocabulary and establish constructive dialogue with representatives of different artistic styles, he left for Paris, where he was to spend the rest of his life. Introduced at the Café Nouvelle Athènes by the imaginative intellectual Marcellin Desboutin, a close friend from the Florentine period, he began to frequent the “Intransigents”, as the Impressionists then called themselves, and the writers who championed them, including Edmond Duranty and Emile Zola. He soon took up the Impressionist style, adopting in particular the approach and ideas of Edgar Degas, whose works he admired for their grounding in synthesis and the compositional values of draughtsmanship. Degas invited Zandomeneghi to take part in the group’s exhibitions and in 1879 he presented Violettes d’hiver, a female figure of intriguing Japoniste twodimensionality, partly influenced by Giuseppe De Nittis, and two portraits, one of Diego Martelli, a cultured champion of modern art.
From then on, he devoted his energies with great conviction to scenes of contemporary life imbued with a sense of transience by the unusual handling of space and quick, threadlike, glowing brushstrokes. Eloquent examples include Mère et fille, presented in 1880 at the Impressionists’ fifth exhibition, and the scenes set in cafés of the mid-1880s, including the pastel Coppia al caffè (Couple in a Café).
Crammed into the narrow space between the table and the wall, a couple are engaged in private conversation. The woman appears to be deeply gratified by the man’s words, as her eyes glisten with emotion in her pale face. Though apparently cropped arbitrarily like a close-up, the image is carefully framed so as to emphasise details capable of enhancing the narrative and pictorial qualities of the scene, from the fan casually resting on the marble tabletop to the chromatic fragrance of the flowers adorning the young woman’s breast and hat so as to generate harmonious similarities between her apparel and the upholstery of the seating.
The fact that colour is a key element of the painting is also confirmed by the persuasive relationship between the dark figure of the man and the light-infused female figure, through which the artist develops the compositional and emotional aspect of this scene of modern life. This deft handling of colour reflects Zandomeneghi’s cultured reference to the 18th-century tradition and in particular to the work of Rosalba Carriera, the sophisticated interpreter of a female gracefulness whose spirit he appears to share. This reference is enhanced by the artist’s masterly use of pastel after the example of the Impressionists, above all Degas and Renoir, to combine the glowing freshness of the chromatic material, rendered by means of more or less broad and regular hatching, or its impalpable nuances with the purity of the draughtsmanship capable of defining form “with sure evidence”, as Enrico Piceni put it.1 Francesca Dini suggests that this pastel can be identified as the one entitled Au Café shown in the exhibition organised by the Association des XX in Brussels in 1886, where Zandomeneghi took part as a member of the French contingent.2
[Silvestra Bietoletti]
1 Piceni 1967, p. 22.
2 Dini 1989, p. 415, no. 73.