Bars and Restaurants

No open-access works for Bars and Restaurants are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About Bars and Restaurants

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.

The makers