Au café

Au café (At the Café) places Bonnard squarely within the fin-de-siècle tradition of café painting that runs from Manet through Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec. The café was the primary social institution of Parisian bohemian and bourgeois life alike—a place of conversation, solitude, consumption, and display that the avant-garde continually mined for modern subject matter. Bonnard's café scenes belong to his early Parisian period, when he was working in Montmartre and the neighborhood cafés were his immediate social environment. His treatment differs from Degas's psychological focus on isolation within crowd—Bonnard was more interested in the visual texture of the café interior, its mirrors, marble tables, and compressed, animated figures.

The café interior typically involves the play of artificial light—gas or early electric—against the dark clothing of seated figures. Bonnard renders the mirrored walls, marble table surfaces, and glassware as a series of reflective and refractive surfaces within the overall warm tone of the interior. Figures are loosely characterized, their individuality subordinated to the social density of the scene.