Each masterpiece in the series is a fascinating art-history novella and, at the same time, an invitation to the following tale, the next chapter in this never-ending cycle of astonishing stories, of which the museum has so many. Picasso produced this work in the Autumn of 1901, during his second trip to Paris, when he was just 22 years old. The theme of man's loneliness in a cafe, of isolation and emptiness, was not new to French art in the second half of the 19th century and could be found in the works of Degas and of Picasso's much-admired Toulouse-Lautrec. But in the paintings by the young Spaniard the theme acquired a previously unknown sense of drama.
