Coffee Shop Images

This post presents coffee shop images.

Last Update: 8th August 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.

Interior with Three Figures in the Café
Erma Bossi

Interior with Three Figures in the Café
Erma Bossi (c. 1910)
Oil on cardboard
56 x 41 cm

“Erma Bossi was an Italian artist born in 1882. An artistic prodigy as a teen, she was sent to the Women’s Art Academy in Munich at the turn of the century, where she soon met Gabriele Münter. In 1909 Bossi joined the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM), which had just been founded and which showed its members’ work at the famous Galerie Thannhauser. This artists’ association included among its members Kandinsky and Münter, Marianne von Werefkin, Franz Marc, Moissey Kogan, Karl Hofer, and others—all the key German Expressionists.

At the outbreak of World War I, Bossi moved to Paris, eventually settling in Milan in 1918. She remained in contact with the Parisian avant-garde, showing her paintings at the annual exhibitions mounted by the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d’Automne. Bossi was one of the few women to participate in the 1930 and 1935 Venice Biennales, her large, simplified forms in festive colors having become a template of the international avant-garde.

Today, we present a work characteristic of her Expressionist period, with bold, sharp colors, which we may confuse with works of Kandinsky or Münter from that period.”

SOURCE: DailyArtMagazine.com

At the Café, 1911 – Emil Nolde

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner – The Garden Cafe, 1914

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

Hanns Kralik (German, 1900-1971) was born on this day.
“Café interior”, 1936, woodcut.
Kralik was arrested in 1933 and interned in the concentration camp. He managed to flee to Paris where he was active in the resistance against the fascist occupation of France.

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.