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.