At the Café

At the Café at the Cleveland Museum of Art, painted in 1898, shows Vuillard moving from the enclosed domestic interiors of his most intense Nabi period to the semi-public space of the café — a characteristically modern Parisian institution where the boundary between public and private was always in flux. Café scenes had been central to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting from Degas through Toulouse-Lautrec, but Vuillard's version is more intimate and less theatrical than most — the café as private bubble rather than social stage.

The café interior is rendered with Vuillard's characteristic merging of figures and environment — the patrons are partially absorbed into the surrounding tables, chairs, and decorative elements rather than standing clear against the space. The artificial lighting of the café interior creates warm color tones quite different from his natural-light domestic works.