"Manet himself early in his career had frequented the fashionable Café Tortoni on the boulevard des Italiens, along with Baudelaire and Duranty. Around 1866 he had changed to the Café Guerbois near the palce de Clichy, a more modest establishment, gathering around him Zola, Duranty and most of the future impressionists. Yet it was only a decade later, when he changed once more, to the Café dea la Nouvelle-Athenes on the place Pigalle, bringing with him the same group of artists and writers, that the café emerged as a major theme in their work. Degas at the Nouvelle Athenes and the Ambassadeurs, Renoir at the Moulin de la Galette and a Montmartre bistro, Forain at the Folies-Bergère and the Jardin de Paris, Manet himself at the Nouvelle-Athenes, the Brasserie de Reichshoffen, and the Folies-Bergère - all were responding to the sudden vogue of café subjects in the late 1870s."
