MURA · THE COLLECTION · ÉDOUARD VUILLARD

Café Wepler

A crowded Paris brasserie painted by Édouard Vuillard around 1908 to 1910 and reworked in 1912. The Wepler still trades on Place Clichy in Montmartre. The painting, oil on fabric, 62.2 by 103.2 centimetres, belongs to the Cleveland Museum of Art, which received it from the Hanna Fund in 1950.

Édouard Vuillard · c. 1908–10, reworked in 1912 · Oil on fabric · France, late 19th-early 20th Century · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The Cleveland Museum of Art describes the setting: "The Wepler, a large brasserie restaurant on Place Clichy in the Montmartre district of Paris, is composed of several rooms on different levels. Once frequented by bohemian artists like Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, the Wepler is still in business today." The café was established in 1881. In Mura's catalogue the scene is summed up as golden mirrors and pale tablecloths filling a busy café with a warm, shimmering light.

How it was painted

Vuillard (1868–1940) trained at the Académie Julian from 1886 and, by 1889, had been persuaded by Maurice Denis to join the Nabis, a group whose members, the museum notes, were to work "not from nature but from memory". Wikipedia dates his membership to 1891 through 1900 and records that, after the group dispersed, he adopted a more realistic style, treating landscapes and interiors with greater detail and vivid colours. He showed many new landscapes at Bernheim-Jeune in November 1908, the period in which this canvas was begun. The museum's dating, "c. 1908–10, reworked in 1912", places the final campaign in a year in which Vuillard also refused the Légion d'honneur and received a commission for panels at the new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

Where it went

The painting stayed in Vuillard's studio until his death in 1940 and passed by inheritance to his nephew Jacques Roussel, who lent it, as "Restaurant Wepler", to an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1949. The dealer César de Hauke in New York sold it to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1950; the museum's provenance file notes that a sale from Roussel to de Hauke is likely but unconfirmed. The credit line is Gift of the Hanna Fund, accession number 1950.90. It has travelled widely, including the museum's touring exhibition "Monet to Dalí: Modern Masters from the Cleveland Museum of Art" (2006–2009), and is currently not on view.

Why it is in Mura

It sits in the Impressionist Life collection with the mood "luminous": a room full of people and light, made to be looked into rather than at.