Antiques for Sale > Paintings & Drawings

This drawing was made during a trip by the artist and his family to Paris in the summer of 1959. Café du Dôme, 108 Boulevard Montparnasse, opened in 1898, the first of the cafés on the boulevard that were frequented by artists and which became the centers of their social lives. It was a café that Moses frequented during his first stay in Paris on a fellowship in the late 1920s.

Kiki’s Paris: Artists & Lovers, 1900-1930 (Billy Culver and Julie Martin, Abrams, New York, 1989) contains many references to and photographs and drawings of the Café du Dôme: Typically (in the 1920s), the artists worked in the mornings, went to the Dôme for drinks and lunch, and then back to work…Mornings the terrasse of the Dôme was filled with boys and girls with furry mouths and not very clean ideas who counted on a café-crème to put them in shape again.

In Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast the Dôme is characterized as being less a gathering place for the idle and decadent than the neighboring Café de la Rotonde: The Dôme was crowded too, but there were people there who had worked. There were models who had worked and there were painters who had worked until the light was gone and there were writers who had finished a day’s work for better or worse, and there were drinkers and characters, some of whom I knew and some that were only decorations.

One of the artists whose name is often mentioned in connection with the Café du Dôme is Moses Soyer’s friend, Jules Pascin.

 According to his son, David, “Moses often spoke of the ‘Dôme’ when he reminisced about his early stay in Paris (1926-28), and it must have been an intensely emotional experience to revisit it much later in his life and career.”