This post presents coffee shop images.
Last Update: 16 March 2024.
Height: Height: 147 millimetres
Width: Width: 220 millimetres
The British Museum, London, UK
Interior of a London Coffee-house; maid in white lace frontage behind canopied bar and manservant taking clay pipes from a chest, at centre, another servant pouring coffee, to right, group of men seated on benches with newspapers and cups, in background, fire with cauldron, various paintings and notices on wall.
This drawing is a rare visual record of a late 17th-century London coffee house interior, in a style similar to that used for fan painting of the period. The costumes suggest a date in the mid or late 1690s.
The Venetian coffeehouse since 1720
Oil on canvas, 78 x 84 cm
Oskar Reinhart Collection ʻAm Römerholz̕, Winterthur, Switzerland
graphite ; lavis d’encre de Chine ; papier vélin quadrill?,
H. 14,1 ; L. 18,7 cm,
Achat, 1954,©
RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/DR
Manet was the quintessential “Painter of Modern Life,” a phrase coined by art critic and poet Charles Baudelaire. In 1878-79, he painted a number of scenes set in the Cabaret de Reichshoffen on the Boulevard Rochechouart, where women on the fringes of society freely intermingled with well-heeled gentlemen. Here, Manet captures the kaleidoscopic pleasures of Parisian nightlife. The figures are crowded into the compact space of the canvas, each one seemingly oblivious of the others. When exhibited at La Vie Moderne gallery in 1880, this work was praised by some for its unflinching realism and criticized by others for its apparent crudeness.
Musée d’Orsay, on deposit to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen.
Fernand Lungren, American, 1857–1932. In the Café, 1882–84
In 1882 Fernand Lungren travelled to Paris, where he briefly attended classes at the Académie Julian before abandoning formal training in favour of direct observation of the city and its people. Here, a fashionably dressed woman sits alone and alert. Her presence is a sign of modern Paris’s changing social environment, in which café culture offered women new opportunities for leisure in public spaces. Although Lungren employed a dense, hard-edged style, his interest in modern life and the effects of light (here both gas and electric lighting) was nevertheless indebted to French Impressionism.
chalk, reed pen, India ink and graphite on laid paper
Dimensions height: 62.8 cm (24.7 in); width: 47.1 cm (18.5 in)
Dallas Museum of Art, USA
Oil on canvas, 80.7 × 65.3 cm (31.8 × 25.7 in)
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands
After finishing Café Terrace at Night, Van Gogh wrote a letter to his sister expressing his enthusiasm:
I was interrupted precisely by the work that a new painting of the outside of a café in the evening has been giving me these past few days. On the terrace, there are little figures of people drinking. A huge yellow lantern lights the terrace, the façade, the pavement, and even projects light over the cobblestones of the street, which takes on a violet-pink tinge. The gables of the houses on a street that leads away under the blue sky studded with stars are dark blue or violet, with a green tree. Now there’s a painting of night without black. With nothing but beautiful blue, violet and green, and in these surroundings the lighted square is coloured pale sulphur, lemon green. I enormously enjoy painting on the spot at night. In the past they used to draw and paint the picture from the drawing in the daytime. But I find that it suits me to paint the thing straightaway. It’s quite true that I may take a blue for a green in the dark, a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since you can’t make out the nature of the tone clearly. But it’s the only way of getting away from the conventional black night with a poor, pallid and whitish light, while in fact a mere candle by itself gives us the richest yellows and oranges.
[Letter 678 (in French) from Vincent van Gogh to Wilhelmina van Gogh, Arles, 9 and 16 September 1888]
Medium oil on canvas
Dimensions height: 72.4 cm (28.5 in); width: 92.1 cm (36.2 in)
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
The interior depicted is the Café de la Gare, 30 Place Lamartine, run by Joseph-Michel Ginoux and his wife Marie, who in November 1888 posed for Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s Arlésienne.
In August 1888, the artist told his brother in a letter:
Today I am probably going to begin on the interior of the café where I have a room, by gas light, in the evening. It is what they call here a “café de nuit” (they are fairly frequent here), staying open all night. “Night prowlers” can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken in.
[Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh
Arles, 6 August 1888]
Paul Marie Verlaine (1844-1896) au Café François 1er, 69 boulevard Saint-Michel dans le 5e arrondissement de Paris. Photographie de Paul François Arnold Cardon dit Dornac (entre 1890 et 1896)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA
Lautrec based this painting on a staged photograph in which his friend Maurice Guibert played the role of a sleazy low-life type in the company of an unidentified woman. The practice of deriving paintings from photographs was one that Lautrec embraced starting in the 1880s. The painting’s title comes from “Un miché à la mie,” 19th-century slang for a client who neglects to pay a prostitute for her services. Might this play on words have a bearing on the enigmatic relationship between these two figures?
France, 19th century, Oil and tempera with charcoal on millboard
Sheet: 80.3 x 65 cm (31 5/8 x 25 9/16 in.); Framed: 105.4 x 89.5 x 8.3 cm (41 1/2 x 35 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.)
Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection 1925.1409
Cleveland Museum of Arts, USA
Cleveland’s 1925 purchase of this work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec marked the first acquisition of one of the artist’s drawings by a museum in the United States. Its subject, Monsieur Boileau, was a gossip columnist known to drink heavily at Le Mirliton, a nightclub. Here, saturated, acidic tones evoke the room’s gas lamps and thinned oil paint absorbs into its support, producing texture that complements the scene’s grittiness. In his own time, Toulouse-Lautrec was considered a portraitist for such depictions of friends and other inhabitants of his neighborhood. He preferred drawing for its immediacy, using it to record his sitters’ personalities through materials and formal choices. (from the Museum’s website)
oil on cardboard, 81.5 x 60 cm
Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Picasso. Au Caffe. 1900
Musee D’Orsay – Paris: In A Café – Edgar Degas
The sense of despair is unmistakable in this painting of two miserable, shabbily-dressed absinthe drinkers who seem too drunk to keep their eyes focused, let alone communicate with one another. The subjects weren’t real drunkards however, but two of Degas’ friends, the actress Ellen Andrée and fellow artist Marcellin Desboutin.
The problem was that the painting was so convincing that people started believing that these well-know figures were actual alcoholics. The work did so much damage to their reputations that eventually Degas had to come out publicly and explain that they were simply modeling for him.
Erma Bossi (1885-1952)
Im Café (Interieur mit Figuren)
c. 1909-10
Oil on cardboard
At the Café, 1911 – Emil Nolde
Pierre Bonnard – Le Café (Coffee), 1915. Oil on canvas, 73.0 × 106.4 cm. Tate Gallery, London, UK
Unknown photographer.
Born on this day…. Walter Gramatté January 8, 1897 Berlin , GR Died: February 9, 1929, Hamburg, was a German expressionist painter who specialized in magic realism. He worked in Berlin, Hamburg, Hiddensee and Barcelona. He often painted with a mystical view of nature. Many of his works were inspired by his experiences in the First World War and his illness. His works were classified as “Degenerate art” by the Nazi government in 1933 and were not exhibited again until after the war. He was the inspiration for the painter “Catell”, a character in the novel Die Stadt hinter dem Strom by Hermann Kasack.
Drypoint, 1920, from Radierwerk I, signed in pencil, dated, titled, numbered 14/20 (there was also a numbered edition of 10), published by Heinar Schilling, Dresdner Verlag, Dresden, on cream wove paper, unframed
plate: 250 by 185mm 9 3/4 by 7 3/8 in
sheet: 480 by 350mm 19 by 14in
Medium:Watercolor and ink on paper
Dimensions:19 1/4 x 14 3/8″ (48.9 x 36.5 cm), Paper:Wove.
1922-Maurice-Brange,-Au-Café–Solita-Solano-and-Djuna-Barnes-in-Paris
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (German, 1880–1938)
“Cafe”, 1928
Art Deco Cafe, illustration by Martin Wickstrom
The FSA was one of many New Deal agencies created during the Great Depression in the United States. The FSA resettled poor farmers on more productive land, promoted soil conservation, provided emergency relief, and loaned money to help farmers buy and improve farms. The photographers documented this work and more, providing us with a window into this era.
Caffé Greco, Rome 1948. Photo Irving Penn
Aldo Palazzeschi, Goffredo Petrassi, Mirko, Carlo Levi, Pericle Fazzini, Afro, Renzo Vespignani, Libero de Libero, Sandro Penna, Lea Padovani, Orson Welles, Mario Mafai, Ennio Flajano, Vitaliano Brancati and Orfeo Tamburi.
Paris 1957
Alberto Giacometti and his wife Annette at Café Express in Paris December 1957
by Robert Doisneau
Acrylic on lined cardboard. 186 x 243 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
It is a painting dedicated to Giorgio de Chirico.
The profile figure of Giorgio de Chirico, an artist whom Guttuso regarded as the last survivor among the great geniuses of the century, is shown seated on the left, gazing at the rest of the people. According to the artist, his presence acted as a “catalyst” of the scene, although he went on to explain that “the fascination with the place largely stemmed from the people who had passed through it, from Buffalo Bill to Gabriele d’Annunzio.” (Paloma Alarcó).
Oil on canvas, h: 100 cm x w: 70 cm
This is one of the few remaining traditional coffee shops (kafeneio) in Greece. The label reads “Kafeneion Kloni”. It is located in Constitution Square, City of Nafplio, the first capital of the modern (post 1821) Greek State.