Café Dancer

By the late nineteenth century, Parisian café concerts and dance halls, many in the bohemian neighborhood of Montmartre, had become carnival-like spaces of spectacle and sexual freedom, particularly for bourgeois male patrons. Louis Valtat’s vivid painting depicts one of the many working-class women who found employment in such venues performing the risqué, high-kicking dance known as the cancan, or chahut. She entertains a crowd of men in top hats, seen in the background.