Not to be confused with a previous café (1805–1884) at Palais-Royal, or another at the corner of Boulevard Haussmann and Rue Lafayette (fl. c. 1900).

The Café de la Rotonde (kafe də la ʁɔtɔ̃d) is a famous café

Café

A café , also spelled cafe, in most countries refers to an establishment which focuses on serving coffee, like an American coffeehouse. In the United States, it may refer to an informal restaurant, offering a range of hot meals and made-to-order sandwiches...

 in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

. Located on the Carrefour Vavin, at the corner of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail, it was founded by Victor Libion in 1910. Along with Le Dome

Le Dome Cafe

Le Dôme Café or Café du Dôme is a restaurant in Montparnasse, Paris. From the beginning of the 1900s, it was renowned as an intellectual gathering place. It was widely known as "the Anglo-American café."...

 and La Coupole it was renowned as an intellectual gathering place for notable artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

s and writer

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

s during the interwar period.

History

Frequented by Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

, who had a studio nearby, in 1914, when the English painter Nina Hamnett

Nina Hamnett

Nina Hamnett was a Welsh artist and writer, and an expert on sailors' chanteys, who became known as the Queen of Bohemia.- Early life :...

 arrived in Montparnasse, on her first evening the smiling man at the next table at La Rotonde graciously introduced himself as "Modigliani, painter and Jew". They became good friends, Hamnett later recounting how she once borrowed a jersey and corduroy trousers from Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...

, then went to La Rotonde and danced in the street all night.

During this creative era, proprietor Libion allowed starving artists to sit in his café for hours, nursing a ten-centime cup of coffee

Coffee

Coffee is a brewed beverage with a dark,init brooo acidic flavor prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant, colloquially called coffee beans. The beans are found in coffee cherries, which grow on trees cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia,...

 and looked the other way when they broke the ends from a baguette in the bread basket. If an impoverished painter couldn't pay their bill, Libion would often accept a drawing, holding it until the artist could pay. As such, there were times when the café's walls were littered with a collection of artworks, that today would make the curators of the world's greatest museums drool with envy.

Unlike many establishments in Montparnasse, La Rotonde has retained much of its bohemian charm and continues in operation to this day as a popular spot for the Parisian Intelligentsia.

Life in the cafe was depicted by several of the artists that frequented the cafe, including Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera

Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was a prominent Mexican painter born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, an active communist, and husband of Frida Kahlo . His large wall works in fresco helped establish the Mexican Mural Movement in...

, Federico Cantú, and Tsuguharu Foujita

Tsuguharu Foujita

was a painter and printmaker born in Tokyo, Japan who applied Japanese ink techniques to Western style paintings.- Education :In 1910 when he was twenty-four years old Foujita graduated from what is now the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music....

, who depicted a fight in the cafe in his etching "A la Rotonde" of 1925. A later 1927 version Le Café de la Rotonde was part of the Tableaux de Paris of 1929.

Picasso portrayed two diners in the cafe in his painting "In the cafe de la Rotonde" in 1901; as did the Russian artist Alexandre Jacovleff

Alexandre Jacovleff

Alexandre Yevgenievich Jacovleff was a Russian neoclassicist painter, draughtsman, designer and etcher.-Biography:...

 aka Alexander Yevgenievich Yakovlev in the similarly titled “In the Cafe de la Rotonde“