La Nouvelle Athènes was a Parisian subdivision established in the early 1820s. It was famously the neighborhood of eminent artists, writers and musicians of the mid-century.
In Confessions of a Young Man (1888) George Moore recalled meeting his aesthetic icons in the café named for the neighborhood at 66 Rue Pigalle, shown above in an undated colorized photograph. He purportedly lived nearby at 76 Rue de la Tour des Dames with his pal, the artist Lewis Welden Hawkins, though no letters have surfaced with that return address.
Edgar Degas, L’Absinthe (1878), depicting actress Ellen Andrée and artist Marcellin Desboutin at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes (Wikimedia Commons). George Moore discussed the significance of this painting in “The New Art Criticism,” The Speaker, 25 March 1893 (a two-part essay collected in Modern Painting (1893).
The Café Guerbois at 9 Avenue de Clichy was a fifteen-minute walk from the Nouvelle Athènes. Also frequented by members of the French avant-garde, but unmentioned by George Moore in his memoirs.
Leave a comment