Le Père Lathuile was a restaurant Manet visited occasionally on the Avenue de Clichy near the Café Guerbois. The restaurant's sign is clearly visible in a well-known lithograph' of the period reproducing Horace Vernet's Marshall Moncey at the Clichy Tollgate of 1814 (see Charles Sterling and Hél?ne Adhémar, Musée National du Louvre, peinture, école Française XIXe si?cle, Paris, 1958-61, IV, no. 1976); the publicity no doubt benefited the café. In 1879 Manet decided to paint the owner's son, Louis Gauthier-Lathuile, in a cavalry uniform and seated with the actress Ellen André. After a few sittings, Manet changed his mind and painted the young man in civilian clothes, probably to avoid inviting comparison with the genre subjects of Roybet and Meissonier. In addition to the costume change, Ellen André was replaced by Judith French, a relative of the composer Jacques Offenbach. For a long time Manet was not entirely persuaded by the avant-garde experiments of his young Impressionist friends, especially those who gathered at the Café Guerbois and who had adopted him, somewhat against his will, as their leader. But by 1874 he had fully accepted the Impressionist idiom and given up dark brown shadows for open-air painting. In The Père Lathuile Restaurant the lighting is soft overall and the shadows are bluish or pink; the brushstrokes are quick, light, and visible. Manet, however, remains faithful to certain of his stylistic characteristics : asymmetry, crowding, elusive perspective, and no sky. The alliance, sometimes difficult, between Manet and the Impressionists, of which this picture is a characteristic example, resulted in renewed sharp critical attacks at about the time the public was adjusting to his earlier style. When Manet exhibited The Père Lathuile Restaurant beside his portrait of Antonin Proust in the Salon of 1880, the latter, which is closer to his earlier style, gave the critics a pretext to attack the former. Paul Mantz wrote :

"Taking shelter behind his portrait of M. Proust, M. Manet suddenly unleashed his devices on us and offered us a plein-air scene of the most worrisome variety... for reasons not explained, the young man has blue hair. The young woman has no idea how inelegant she is... let us forget this nightmare." Four years later, when the picture was shown in a memorial exhibition for Manet, Josépin Péladan, the future Rosicrucian, also objected "The luncheon at Père Lathuile's has some air in it; the distance between the background and the table is approximately correct, but it is impossible to accept that the young man's tie is as important as the woman's complexion; this tie clashes against the pale pure colours as harshly as the famous red cap in the picture by Valentin in the museum in the Vatican" ("'Manet's Methods," L'Artiste, February 1884, p. 114). However, 'The Père Lathuile Restaurant was defended by Emile Zola and J.K: Huysmans (Huysmans was, at that time, best known as the novelist who had lionized Gustave Moreau in his A Rebours.) In fact, Huysmans eloquently defended his preference of The Père Lathuile Restaurant to the portrait of Antonin Proust : "The young man and woman are superb. This canvas catches the eye because it is so clear and bright; it shines among all these official paintings which turn rancid as soon as one sees them. This is the modernism that I have spoken about ! People eating lunch in real light, in the open air... life shown as it is, without exaggeration" (La Réforme, July 1, 1880, reprinted in L'Art Moderne, Paris, 1883, p. 155-156).

Provenance :

(1879-80, Gauthier-Lathuile refused to buy this picture from Manet); in Manet's estate sale, February 4-5; 1884, no. 6; collection of Théodore Duret (in Duret sale, Paris, March 19, 1894, no. 257); Von Cutsen Collection; bequeathed by Von Cutsen to Guillaume Charlier; bequeathed by Charlier to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tournai.

Exhibitions:

1880 Paris, Salon, no. 245 l

1880 Ghent, Triennial Exhibition, no. 571

1884 Paris, Ecole des Beaux- Arts, Manet, no. 94

1895 Paris, Durand-Ruel Gallery, Manet, no. 10

1922 Brussels, Muse Royal des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Exposition d'Art Français, no. 22

1932 London, Exhibition of French Art, no. 417

1932 Paris, Orangerie des Tuileries, Manet, no. 69 1

937 Paris, Chefs - d'Euvre de l'Art Français, no. 361 1

964 Munich and Lisbon, From Delacroix to Cézanne