Les Ambassadeurs / Cafe-Concert, Paris | Edgar Degas / Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec / John Duncan Fergusson, 1876-1907
Aristide Bruant by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Edgar Degas, Le café-concert des Ambassadeurs, 1876-77
The Café des Ambassadeurs was one of most fashionable and best-known summer venues in Paris situated on the Avenue Gabriel at the entrance to the Champs-Elysées near the Place de la Concorde. Named after the nearby Hotel Crillon that had become the residence of foreign ambassadors, it was founded in 1764 as a simple open air bar, a small pavilion was added in 1772 and it evolved into one of the most famous of the Parisian café concerts. (…)
Edgar Degas, At the Cafe des Ambassadeurs, 1885
Decorated in an 18th-century rococo style, Les Ambassadeurs reached its peak of fame as a restaurant and nightclub (known as a café-concert)
in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s, a few hundred meters from the Palais Garnier.
in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s, a few hundred meters from the Palais Garnier.
Always a center of entertainment for the aristocracy, in the 1870s it was a regular destination of some of the best known figures of art and the demi-monde.
Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec portrayed visitors at the night club, and Aristide Bruant performed there.