COFFEE AND PAINTING

Museums all over Europe are filled with paintings inspired by coffee. They generally portray coffeehouses frequented by artists, coffee drunk at home and people enjoying a chat over a cup of coffee. The world’s first depiction of a coffeehouse was painted by the Dutch artist Adrian van Ostade. Paintings by artists such as François Boucher, Franz Schams and Jean Léon Jérôme offer great insight into both early coffee culture and the coffeehouses of the past.

In Turkey, Ali Rıza Bey of Üsküdar painted important works on the subject of coffee. His life spanned the late 19th and the early 20th century, and he specialised in charcoal drawings of summer and winter coffeehouses, coffee stoves, coffee cups, coffeepots (cezves), coffee cabinets and itinerant coffee vendors. Today, many of his extant paintings can be found in private collections.