Café Lafayette 1914

William James Glackens made "Cafe Lafayette" with oil paints and a loaded brush. Look how he laid down these strokes; they're not blended, but juicy, and left raw. It’s a good reminder that painting is a process, a laying down of marks that accumulate into an image, like building a wall, one brick at a time. The paint is quite thick in places, and the surface shimmers with subtle color shifts, especially in the blue dress. See how this area is built up of small, visible brushstrokes? They give the fabric a feeling of weight and volume, like a sculpture made of paint. The red accents in the background are reminiscent of Renoir. There's a sense of passing time, of a specific moment captured. Ultimately, the beauty of a painting like this is its ambiguity. It invites us to linger, to lose ourselves in the play of color and light, and to find our own meaning in the image.