Bars and Restaurants
Taverns, cafés, bars, diners and restaurants as settings for pleasure, loneliness and social display.
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Taverns, cafés, bars and restaurants are public rooms where strangers watch one another, and painters have used them to stage pleasure, solitude and the codes of class. In the 17th-century Dutch Republic, Jan Steen and Cornelis Bega painted smoky inns full of drinking, flirting and quarrels, often with a moral warning tucked in.
Paris made the café a sign of modern life. Edgar Degas's In a Café (1875–76), also called L'Absinthe, sets two silent drinkers at a marble table; Vincent van Gogh described his The Night Café (1888) as a place where one could ruin oneself or go mad; and Édouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) traps the viewer in a barmaid's mirror. Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (1942) turns a New York corner diner into a glass case of isolation. Denzil Forrester's paintings of London dub clubs in the 1980s catch the opposite: rhythm, heat and crowding.
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