Christie's New York, May 24, 1984, lot 370

"Water Colors at the Art Association Exhibition," Brooklyn Eagle, March 16, 1882, p. 2

Paul E. Doros, The Art Glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany, New York, 2013, p. 19 (for 💞the present lot illustrated)

Brooklyn Art Association, New York, March 1882, 🐻no. 422

Tiffany’s A Café at Cairo garnered positive attention when it was exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association in 1882. A reviewer for the Brooklyn Eagle noted:

“The work is full of Tiffany’s peculiar color. A low stone building stand [sic] a little back from theforeground, heavy stone steps leading up to its entrance, and grouped before it are a number of Arabs, draped in rich costumes and naturally posed. Two massive trees stand before the building, the Arabs resting beneath💧 their shade. The composition of the work is admirable, and it is altogether one of the best pictures in the collection.”

Curiously, Tiffany’s scene was not a café in Cairo, but rather the well-known Café of the Plantain Trees (Café des Plantanes) in Algiers near the French Test Garden of Hamma (Jardin d’Es💯sai du Hamma). The vantage point is nearly identical to one also selected by Albert-Charles Lebourg (1849–1928), a Frenchman who taught drawing in Algiers from 1872 to 1877. Tiffany almost certainly visited the Café of the Plantain Trees in the early months of 1876 and probably did studies and perhaps more finished work during this time. Because this painting is not dated and because it was apparently first exhibited 🎶six years after his tour of Algeria, Tiffany, an inveterate traveler, may simply have misremembered the location.

–RAM