Café de la Rotonde

Cultural History

Pablo Picasso frequented La Rotonde around 1914, as his studio was nearby at 242 Boulevard Raspail. He spent time there with artist and poet friends including Diego Rivera, Federico Cantú, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Tsuguharu Foujita. When the English painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse, a man at the next table introduced himself as "Modigliani, painter and Jew"; they became good friends. Reproduced paintings by Amedeo Modigliani now fill the café's interior.

In the early years, proprietor Victor Libion allowed starving artists to sit for hours over a cheap cup of coffee and overlooked them breaking ends from baguettes in the bread basket. If an impoverished painter could not pay, Libion often accepted a drawing, holding it until the artist could pay; at times the café's walls were covered with artworks that would later be envied by museum curators. When Peggy Guggenheim moved to Paris in 1920, she increased La Rotonde's popularity by moving her entourage across the street from Le Dome because La Rotonde allowed women to smoke on the terrace.

Life in the café was depicted by several artists and writers, including Diego Rivera, Federico Cantú, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Tsuguharu Foujita, who made an etching titled A la Rotonde in 1925; a later 1927 version, Le Café de la Rotonde, was part of the Tableaux de Paris of 1929. Picasso portrayed two diners in his painting In the cafe de la Rotonde in 1901, though that painting was created before La Rotonde opened and actually depicts another café called L'Hippodrome.

Ernest Hemingway mentions La Rotonde in Chapter VI of his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), writing that taxi drivers from the right bank always take passengers to the Rotonde regardless of which Montparnasse café they request.