Orpen’s
bill from the Café Royal carries a distinctive monogram, the capital letter N
beneath a crown. This haughty gesture recurs throughout the lavish
interior decorations of the café, and, I fancy, embraces a degree of Gallic
mischief. In 1865, Daniel-Nicolas Thévenon, a French wine merchant, established
the Café Royal in extensive premises on the Crown Estate at the bottom of
Regent Street, hard by Piccadilly Circus. He anglicized his name to Daniel
Nicols, and by the end of the century his son and namesake took the Café Royal to
new heights of opulence. Its cellars were famous for their size, distinction,
and rarity. The Café Royal became one of the most fashionable establishments in
the West End, and was frequented by artists and writers such as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey
Beardsley, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard
Kipling, W. B. Yeats, Walter Sickert, Max Beerbohm, James McNeill Whistler, William
Nicholson, Augustus John, and obviously William Orpen too. The character of the
place embraced the dizzyingly high, expressed above all by its
extravagant décor, but also the forthrightly low. Some of the early rules of
boxing were first written down in the building, and contests were regularly
staged there. No doubt this was something that drew Nicholson and John
especially—both were connoisseurs of the boxing ring. From the vantage point of
the 1920s and 1930s, when it was still going strong, the Edwardian Café Royal was
recalled as so many charmed caverns, their gilding and encrusted ornamentation softened
by thick blue cigar smoke, and the buzz of brilliant talk brightened further by
the clack and shuffle of dominoes over marble. Through all of this, not unlike
the flamboyant César Ritz, Daniel Nicols oversaw his palatial establishment
with the flair and instinct for public relations that distinguishes a true
impresario. He was the svengali of catering, a gentleman moreover eagerly
sought after for preferred table reservations, or, in the case of social indiscretions,
tables in quiet corners. His monogram refers unabashedly to that of
Napoleon, but also implies no less imperial authority wielded over a West End
café society that increasingly sought to distinguish itself from the
starchiness of clubland, the inaccessibility of the Court, and from the rough
and tumble of music hall entertainment.
Installation
continues apace. This morning we unpacked, condition-checked, and hung the great self-portrait by Sir
William Orpen entitled Myself and Venus that comes to us from the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At once I realized I
have made an error in the relevant catalogue entry. The picture is very close to the artist’s nearly contemporaneous Self-Portrait (Leading the Life in the West) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
which unfortunately cannot travel any more, and it contains the same conceit of the large, framed mirror facing
the window of Orpen’s studio. In the New York painting Orpen showed various
invitations, letters, opened envelopes, and other pieces of colored paper slipped between
the vertical edges of the mirror and the wall, but in the Pittsburgh picture there is only one—which I
took to be a newspaper clipping, perhaps a positive notice in one of the
weeklies, or some such. That would be consistent with his steadily growing self-regard.
Instead I
see now that this large piece of paper is a sizeable bill from The Café Royal, an itemized check, quite a long one, to which Orpen has
added his notional and, I suppose, actual signature at the top, the souvenir of a bibulous evening spent with artist friends in
that glamorous establishment at the bottom of Regent Street, hard by Piccadilly Circus, presumably in the
opulent surroundings of the Domino Room. As it happens, we will have
Charles Ginner’s view of the interior of that very room in the next bay but
one, so this could not be a happier state of affairs. As well, the plaster
cast of Orpen’s Venus is also present in his collegial group portrait from the Manchester City Art Gallery entitled
Homage to Manet, but because in the Pittsburgh picture it is seen by Orpen reflected in the mirror with which he also sees himself it is naturally
reversed. These two paintings will hang side by side, which is a rather neat
curatorial stratagem, if I do say so.
