The fact that artists have long been fond of cafes is no secret, with the presence of artists often turning an unknown café into a celebrated scene. For late 19th and early 20th century artists in particular, cafes offered interesting sights or the company of fellow creative or desperate souls, along with a chance to escape the studio and partake in wine, women, occasional song, food — and even some actual coffee.
Jean Beraud’s Au Café
French Impressionist Jean Beraud (1849-1936) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and immigrated to France as a child. He studied art in Paris after the Franco-Prussian War and succeeded in mingling within both Russian and French social circles.
Beraud developed a reputation for painting scenes of everyday Paris like patisseries, outdoor concerts and boulevard views, and in Beraud’s Au Café, a couple sits and focuses on something or someone out of view. Beraud does a fine job detailing the marble table, the half-filled glasses and wisps of smoke rising from the young man’s cigarette, and by not having his couple face each other, he creates intriguing possibilities as to just what is going on between them.
Is this a first encounter or are they breaking up? Why are they so intent on some other sight? The slightly askew chair in front of their table could suggest that the man has edged from that same chair closer to the woman, or that a third party has stepped away for a moment and may be the subject of their guarded watchfulness.
Van Gogh and Gauguin’s Night Cafes
Post-Impressionist icons Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh’s friendship reached a crisis point when the latter artist reportedly took a razor to his own ear in a famed outburst of self-mutilation. Gauguin was in Arles with Van Gogh at the time, and he left immediately after. Before then, however, Gauguin and Van Gogh spent several weeks painting together at the "Yellow House" in Arles, France. They worked until late December of 1888, sometimes enjoying a unique artistic camaraderie, other times drinking too much and arguing like two highly talented and intense men might be prone to do.
Van Gogh and Gauguin did agree upon one particular Arles’ nightspot as a painting subject, and each created his own view of the scene. Van Gogh’s Night Café is a bright, unsettling place, with Van Gogh’s intent being to show the café as a setting "where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime." His color objective was to give the effect of a "devil’s furnace" and seems like a backdrop for alcoholic seesawing between anger and depression.
Gauguin, on the other hand, did not care for a hellish perspective. The center of his strongly-colored painting is Marie Ginoux, the café owner’s wife, and her attentive amusement toward her patrons. Gauguin’s work is also more intimate, with appealing details like the sugar cubes before Madame Ginoux and the small cat underneath the pool table.
Viktor Oliva’s Absinthe Drinker
In terms of illusory views of cafes and the escape from reality they could provide, Viktor Oliva’s 1889 Absinthe Drinker offers a heady glimpse of a visit from the Green Fairy. The wormwood-derived absinthe was popular in the later 19th century and was often referred to as the "Green Fairy" because of its dreamy green color and bewitching effects.
Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet created portraits of rather bleary absinthe drinkers, but Czech artist Oliva kept his vision more within the realm of sensual fantasy. Absinthe eventually developed a reputation for causing mental illness and addiction, though research has suggested that many of the negative claims were exaggerated. Oliva’s absinthe gentleman does seem to be in an altered state, though, and might be in danger of becoming too dependent upon his favorite café and his love for the intoxicating green beauty who joins him there.
Gabriel Deluc’s Café Scene
In many cases both past and present, more than just coffee is brewed in cafes. Sociopolitical dissatisfaction is expressed and change or even revolution pondered, and in a circa 1914 painting by artist Gabriel Deluc, the patrons of one café scene are finding a particular speaker highly compelling. Deluc’s work is purportedly a portrait of a young Benito Mussolini in action, no doubt voicing his plans to return Italy to its former Roman glory.
Deluc uses murky colors to show the dark charisma of the then-rising dictator, with an interesting mix of skepticism and hope on the faces of those gathered around to listen. Deluc himself was sadly killed in World War I while fighting with the French army, and he was one of the featured soldiers in composer Maurice Ravel‘s memorial work Le Tombeau de Couperin.
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