Coffee Shop Images

This post presents coffee shop images.

Last Update: 16 March 2024.

Anonymous, Interior of a coffeehouse, circa 1690 – 1700

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.

Caffè Florian, style and quality from 1720

The Venetian coffeehouse since 1720

Edouard Manet, Au café 1878

Oil on canvas, 78 x 84 cm

Oskar Reinhart Collection ʻAm Römerholz̕, Winterthur, Switzerland

Edouard Manet, Intérieur de café, date indéterminée

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

Edouard Manet (French, 1832-1883), The Café-Concert, ca. 1879

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.

Gustave Caillebotte, In a Café, 1880

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.

Vincent van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night (1888)

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

Vincent van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night (September 1888)

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]

Vincent van Gogh, The Night Café, 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)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Café La Mie, about 1891, 53 x 67.9 cm

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?

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, French, 1864–1901. Monsieur Boileau at the Café, 1893

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)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Au Café Le consommeteur et la cassière chlorotique, 1898

oil on cardboard, 81.5 x 60 cm

Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

Picasso. Au Caffe. 1900

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

Coffee 1915 Pierre Bonnard 1867?1947 Presented by Sir Michael Sadler through the Art Fund 1941 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05414

Pierre Bonnard – Le Café (Coffee), 1915. Oil on canvas, 73.0 × 106.4 cm. Tate Gallery, London, UK

1916. Thessaloniki, Liberty Square.

Unknown photographer.

Walter Gramatté, Café, 1918, oil on canvas

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.

Otto Dix, Alte im Café (K. 9) 1920

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

Otto Dix, At the Café (Im Café), 1922

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

Farmer in the cafe. Pie Town, New Mexico in 1940. Photograph by Russell Lee, for the Farm Security Administration

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

Renato Guttuso, Caffè Greco, 1976

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).

Nikos Moropoulos, Kafeneio in Nafplio (Coffee Shop in the City of Nafplio), 2006

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.

Green Eyes – Ojos Verdes – Πρασινα Ματια

Greek song
Two green eyes
with blue eye lashes
have driven me into madness
my heart you should know
the eyes you have seen
will come to any good
But I cannot even tell them this,
to the eyes with the greenish color
Ελληνικο εντεχνο τραγουδι
Δυο πρασινα ματια
με μπλε βλεφαριδες
με εχουνε κανει τρελο
καρδια μου να ξερεις
τα ματια που ειδες
πως δεν θα σου βγουν
σε καλο
Φοβαμαι ακομα και να τους το πω
κι ας εχουν το χρωμα το πρασινωπο
Scarlett Johansson

Poison, Charles Baudelaire (from the collection “Les Fleurs du mal”)

Wine knows how to adorn the most sordid hovel

With marvelous luxury
And make more than one fabulous portal appear
In the gold of its red mist
Like a sun setting in a cloudy sky.

Opium magnifies that which is limitless,
Lengthens the unlimited,
Makes time deeper, hollows out voluptuousness,
And with dark, gloomy pleasures
Fills the soul beyond its capacity.

All that is not equal to the poison which flows
From your eyes, from your green eyes,
Lakes where my soul trembles and sees its evil side…
My dreams come in multitude
To slake their thirst in those bitter gulfs.

All that is not equal to the awful wonder
Of your biting saliva,
Charged with madness, that plunges my remorseless soul
Into oblivion
And rolls it in a swoon to the shores of death.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Angelina Jolie

Nico Gabriel Pentzikis, the Rain

Νίκος Γαβριήλ Πεντζίκης, Η βροχή

Like the wind brnging the water, the ship with the sails is tilting

on one side, and the pas under the smooth keel,

and the multiheaded waves rock the boat

leafing through some mementos

submerged my whole being into nostalgia.

Όπως ο άνεμος που φέρνει νερό, γέρνει το πλοίο με τα ιστία
απ’ τη μια μπάντα, και περνούν κάτω απ’ την εύδρομη τρόπιδα,
και σκαμπανεβάζουν το κύτος τα πολυκέφαλα κύματα
το ξεφύλλισμα κάποιων αναμνηστικών,
έγειρε την ύπαρξή μου ολόκληρη στη νοσταλγία.

As the rainfall is, I want to determine,

when the thick drops hit

the blonde summer earth and transform its essence

and raise the smell.

Όπως είναι η βροχή, θέλω να προσδιορίσω,
όταν οι χοντρές στάλες χτυπούν
το ξανθό θερινό χώμα και μεταλλάσσουν την ουσία του
και σηκώνουν τη μυρωδιά.

Like the summer rainfall, when it creeps on the leaves

of the trees and their round shapes

wave shuddering.

Όπως είναι η θερινή βροχή, όταν συρτά περνά πάνω στα φύλλα
των δέντρων κι’ απ’ ανατρίχιασμα κυματίζει
το στρόγγυλο σχήμα τους.

Because your face that I seek is like the abundant rain,

and your green eyes like the heavey color of the weather.

Locked in my room I hear the tasteless rain knock

on the window of my solitude.

Seetest rain, rich in all places.

Γιατί το πρόσωπό σου που ζητώ είναι όπως η βροχή η άφθονη,
και τα πράσινα μάτια σου όπως το χρώμα του καιρού, το βαρύ.
Κλεισμένος στην κάμαρη την άγευστη βροχή ακούω να χτυπά
το παράθυρο της μοναξιάς μου.
Γλυκύτατη βροχή, πλούσια σ’ όλον τον τόπο.

(Newspaper “New Truth” Thessaloniki, 1938)

(Εφημερίδα «Νέα Αλήθεια» Θεσσαλονίκης, 1938)

http://www.translatum.gr/forum/index.php?topic=6785.0#ixzz1BscjPF45

Kristin Kreuk

Lines written in dejection

W. B.Yeats

WHEN have I last looked on
The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies
Of the dark leopards of the moon?
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,
For all their broom-sticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.
The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished;
I have nothing but the embittered sun;
Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,
And now that I have come to fifty years
I must endure the timid sun.

Crucifixion II

I continue today with the second part of the Crucifixion paintings, from the 19th  to the 20th century.

Paul Gauguin

Yellow Christ (1889)

Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin

Albright-Know Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA

Emil Nolde

Crucifixion (1912) 

Emil Nolde
Emil Nolde

Nolde Stifftung, Seebull

On February 20, 1912, the painter Emil Nolde wrote to his friend and patron Karl Osthaus, director of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, concerning an upcoming exhibition there, and announced a major new work:

In the last year I have created a piece consisting of nine biblical pictures that belong together.I finished it during the last few weeks. I thought that I would also send this to you forexhibition. The size of the entire piece: 240cm high, 630cm wide.

On February 28, 1912, he wrote to his long-time friend Hans Fehr about the piece, enclosing a thumbnail sketch of it that shows a large central picture of a crucifixion flanked on either side byfour paintings. Nolde identified the subjects of the eight smaller canvases in writing on thesketch: Holy Night and The Twelve-Year-Old Christ (left above), The Three Magi and TheBetrayal of Christ (left below), Women at the Tomb and Ascension (right above), Resurrectionand Doubting Thomas (right below).2 All nine canvases of this work, known collectively as TheLife of Christ, remain together today in the galleries of the Nolde Foundation, near Seebüll,Germany. 

Nolde no doubt recognized that the monumental scheme of The Life of Christ–far larger than any previous work–almost literally hinged on Crucifixion.7 For it he incorporated a symmetrical severity and a solidity of construction well beyond any earlier picture. The three crosses establish the central axis, outer boundaries, and upper edge of the composition. Nolde pushed the figures almost into a single plane very close to the picture’s surface. He reinforced the iconic effect that results with certain aspects of his primitivizing style, mainly angular forms, flat colors, and unworked surfaces….

Of the individual canvases for The Life of Christ, Crucifixion contains the most obvious traces of an interest in Northern Medieval art. Crucifixions from this period frequently include several motifs—all incorporated by Nolde. First, the tortured flesh of Christ, in the form of an emaciated body, prominent wounds, and streams of blood. Grünewald’s Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altarpiece is the best known and most extreme example of this type. Second, the followers traditionally stand to the left of the cross and display intense emotions through gesture and physiognomy, often with the Magdalene on her knees and grasping the base of the cross and the Virgin collapsing into the arms of St. John. Third, many contrast the followers on the left with an equally distinct group of executioners and mockers to the right. Nolde even imitated a convention of some Medieval art by enlarging the body of Christ for prominence.

Source: William B. Sieger, Literary Texts and Formal Strategies in Emil Nolde’s Religious Paintings

Georges Roualt 

Crucifixion (early 1920s)

Georges Rouault
Georges Rouault

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Pablo Picasso

Crucifixion (1930)

Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso

Musee Picasso, Paris, France

Picasso in addition to the painting (oil on wood) prepared more than ten drawings with ink as “studies” on crucifixion. The Isenheim Altarpiece of Grunewald gave him inspiration and challenge.  

Marc Chagall

White Crucifixion (1938)

Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall

Art Institute of Chicago

Francis Bacon 

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion  circa 1944

Francis Bacon - Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
Francis Bacon - Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

Tate Gallery, London, UK

When this triptych was first exhibited at the end of the war in 1945, it secured Bacon’s reputation. The title relates these horrific beasts to the saints traditionally portrayed at the foot of the cross in religious painting. Bacon even suggested he had intended to paint a larger crucifixion beneath which these would appear.He later related these figures to the Eumenides – the vengeful furies of Greek myth, associating them within a broader mythological tradition. Typically, Bacon drew on a range of sources for these figures, including a photograph purporting to show the materialisation of ectoplasm and the work of Pablo Picasso.

Source: Tate Gallery’s website

Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950)

Francis Bacon - Fragment of a Crucifixion
Francis Bacon - Fragment of a Crucifixion

Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Major artists create myths around themselves or have  the ability to motivate others to do it for them. The way Francis Bacon’s work has been received is coloured by this. The view that at certain moments the person and the work sometime coincide gained increasing emphasis in Bacon’s career, culminating with the feature fi lm Love is the Devil (1998) by John Maybury. There is hardly any other artist whose world is so much a part of his work, and spicy details about his life are happily quoted by biographers and reviewers. Bacon himself refused to go into the interpretation of his paintings and after 1962 even forbid any interpretive comment in catalogues. His argument was that there was not anything to explain. Fragment of a Crucifi xion and the response to Bacon’s work give cause to think about interpretation, biography and autonomy. Do the paintings exemplify a state of mind, or can they be related to views about identity and the male body? Do they represent a post-war view on the world, in which the automation of human interaction can be heard, or do the themes deprive us of an insight into a painter ‘easy on himself’?

Source: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Salvador Dali

Christ of Saint John of the Cross: Nuclear Mysticism  (1951)

Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

“The title of the painting was said to have been inspired by a drawing made by a Spanish Carmelite friar who was canonised as St John of The Cross in the 16th Century.

It was made after the saint had a vision in which he saw the crucifixion from above.

Dali painted his crucifixion scene set above the rocky harbour of his home village of Port Lligat in Spain. “

Source: BBC

Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954)

Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

Dali commented on his painting:

“Metaphysical, transcendent cubism, it is based entirely on the Treatise on Cubic Form by Juan de Herrera, Philip the 2nd’s architect, builder of the Escorial Palace: it is a treatise inspired by Ars Magna of the Catalonian philosopher and alchemist Raymond Lulle. The cross is formed by an octahedral hypercube. The number nine is identifiable and becomes especially consubstantial with the body of Christ. The extremely noble figure of Gala is the perfect union of the develpment of the hypercubic octahedron on the human level of the cube. She is depicted in front of the Bay of Port Lligat. The most noble beings were painted by Velazques and Zurbaran; I only approach nobility while painting Gala, and noblity can only be insired by the human being.” 

Antonio Saura

Crucifixion (1959)

Antonio Saura
Antonio Saura

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Euskaleria

“Ever since I was a boy I have been obsessed with Velázquez’ Christ in the Prado in Madrid, with his face darkened by the black hair of a Flamenco dancer, with his bullfighter’s feet, with the stillness of a flesh and bone puppet transformed into Adonis. I can even see myself immersed in the hazy museum, holding my father’s hand and looking at the terrible pacific cross, which I remember as something immense”.

The constant presence of the Crucifixion between 1956 and 1996 doesn’t respond to religious belief. It is, in the artist’s own words, a way of looking at the “timeless presence of suffering”.

“Contrary to Velázquez’ Christ, in these works I thought that by giving the image a feeling of tension and protest it was possible to capture a trace of almost blasphemous humour, but there is something else. In the image of the Crucified Christ, I may have reflected my situation of man alone in a threatening universe at which it is possible to shout, although, seen from another angle, I am also interested in the tragedy of a man “not that of a god” absurdly nailed to a cross. An image which can still serve as the tragic symbol of our era”.

Source: Guggenheim Museum’s website