Man in a Café, 1912 Juan Gris (1887-1927)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Juan Gris also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Man in a Café is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

After adding your artwork to the shopping cart, you will be able to check the delivery price using the Estimate Shipping and Tax tool.

The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A top hat rises like a small black tower, and everything around it clicks into place. Juan Gris gives us a café sitter who feels both impeccably present and oddly engineered, as if he has been assembled from smartly cut pieces of the room. The man’s face is a clever puzzle of planes: moustache, nose, and cheek arrive in angular fragments that still manage to read as a witty, self-possessed expression.

Look how the space behaves. Depth barely gets a chance. A striped awning - those warm, rust-and-cream bands - presses forward while grey blocks of terrace, wall, and window shove back, then forward again. Gris, alone among the artists at the 1912 Salon de la Section d’Or in truly working with the Golden Section, seems to set an underlying order that you feel even if you cannot diagram it. The composition has the calm of a well-tuned mechanism.

Yet it is not cold. That absinthe glass, held close, is a thin greenish triangle with a stem - a sharp little note of pleasure. A second glass sits on the table at right, and the wrought-iron base curls in tight black scrolls, like café furniture you can almost hear scraping on stone. Perhaps you even catch the faint aniseed scent in the air. One hand hooks over the chair back, an elegant gesture turned into geometry.

To the left of his shoulder, letters appear: “PIC” and “AP.” They land like a private nod - to Picasso, co-inventor of Cubism, and to Guillaume Apollinaire, its ardent advocate. Gris isn’t quoting so much as placing his figure inside a conversation, a Paris of arguments and admiration. Compared with Picasso’s more abrasive Cubist interruptions, Juan Gris feels lucid, almost courtly, as if he prefers clarity to shock.

A detail I love: the small, comb-like strokes that articulate the man’s collar and shirtfront, making crisp fabric out of paint that is otherwise so planed and hard. In Man in a Café, sophistication becomes structure. You leave with the sense of a modern personality held together - not by psychology, but by proportion, poise, and a dry, knowing charm.