At the Café Concert

From the Minneapolis Institute of Art record

The Swiss-born artist Richard Ranft began his training in Geneva before moving to Paris as a young man and working as a bank clerk to support his artistic education. In the 1890s, he made countless images of women at the circus, at the racetrack, and at the café-concert, a quintessential form of late nineteenth-century entertainment for the Parisian middle class. In his pastel, Ranft portrays a group of women gathered to socialize and read the evening program as a vaudeville act performs on stage. France, Europe