Skip Navigation

Cafe Scene

Raphael Soyer

American Art

Raphael Soyer had a lifelong interest in the daily lives of working-class New Yorkers. His paintings of lone women in the early 1940s suggest the absence of husbands or sweethearts who had been called up to serve in World War II.

Soyer liked to depict the blank expressions of people lost in thought, leaving the meaning of the scene open to the viewer’s own interpretation. Throughout his career, his subjects conveyed a sense of weariness and disquiet—a mood related to the social isolation of modern urban life.
MEDIUM Oil on canvas
DATES ca. 1940
DIMENSIONS 24 x 20in. (61 x 50.8cm) Frame: 30 1/2 x 26 1/2 x 2 1/4 in. (77.5 x 67.3 x 5.7 cm)  (show scale)
SIGNATURE Lower right: Raphael Soyer
INSCRIPTIONS on frame, in ink: This painting/ I bought from Raphael / Soyer in 1945 - / Julius Zirinsky / Nov. 30th, 1945
COLLECTIONS American Art
ACCESSION NUMBER 46.15
CREDIT LINE Gift of James N. Rosenberg
MUSEUM LOCATION This item is not on view
CAPTION Raphael Soyer (American, born Russia, 1899–1987). Cafe Scene, ca. 1940. Oil on canvas, 24 x 20in. (61 x 50.8cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of James N. Rosenberg, 46.15. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 46.15_SL1.jpg)
IMAGE overall, 46.15_SL1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph
"CUR" at the beginning of an image file name means that the image was created by a curatorial staff member. These study images may be digital point-and-shoot photographs, when we don\'t yet have high-quality studio photography, or they may be scans of older negatives, slides, or photographic prints, providing historical documentation of the object.
RIGHTS STATEMENT © Estate of Raphael Soyer
Copyright for this work may be controlled by the artist, the artist's estate, or other rights holders. A more detailed analysis of its rights history may, however, place it in the public domain. The Museum does not warrant that the use of this work will not infringe on the rights of third parties. It is your responsibility to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions before copying, transmitting, or making other use of protected items beyond that allowed by "fair use," as such term is understood under the United States Copyright Act. For further information about copyright, we recommend resources at the United States Library of Congress, Cornell University, Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Copyright Watch. For more information about the Museum's rights project, including how rights types are assigned, please see our blog posts on copyright. If you have any information regarding this work and rights to it, please contact copyright@brooklynmuseum.org. If you wish to contact the rights holder for this work, please email copyright@brooklynmuseum.org and we will assist if we can.
RECORD COMPLETENESS
Not every record you will find here is complete. More information is available for some works than for others, and some entries have been updated more recently. Records are frequently reviewed and revised, and we welcome any additional information you might have.