In the Café

In 1882 Fernand Lungren traveled to Paris, where he briefly attended classes at the Académie Julian before abandoning formal training in favor 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.