Cafe de la Rotonde

New York–based artist Peggy Bacon trained from 1915 to 1920 at the Art Students League, where she studied with modernists George Bellows and John Sloan. Like her instructors, Bacon created works that record scenes from daily life, including this dense, multifigure composition, which captures the bustling Parisian café that Bacon likely visited during a two-month stay in the French capital. Citing the nineteenth-century French satirist Honoré Daumier as an artistic influence, Bacon depicted the people around her as caricatures, generating a body of work notable as much for its humor and wit as for its virtuosic technique. She is perhaps best known today for her drypoint prints, made by incising lines into a metal plate using a needle—a technique she taught herself using a printing press 
and zinc plates that she came upon while a student at the League.