Edgar Degas

Mademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, Paris, 1877–78. Edgar Degas. Lithograph. Rogers Fund, 1919.
Although cafés had flourished in Paris throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, they became the rage in literature and art after 1875, when the society of the Third Republic increasingly sought an animated public life outside the home and traditional milieus. Degas was one of the first in the circle of French Impressionists to portray the café-concert, a subject previously confined to popular prints and illustrated weeklies.