Fernand Lungren, In the Cafe, Paris, c1883 Poster

Fernand Lungren, In the Cafe, Paris, c1883 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 to participate in public leisure activities. 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. CC0 Public Domain Designation Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago