Im Romanischen Café

Scenes in coffee houses have been a preferred subject in painting and literature since Impressionism. Artists' cafés, bohemian bars and coffee houses became popular meeting places for artists and bourgeois idlers. The depiction of savoring citizens but also of dubious society in the café is represented with numerous examples in big city painting until about the end of the twenties.
Jaeckel turns to the subject from a rather critical side. Bizarre figures, grotesquely dressed up, form a latently aggressive audience without any recognisable relationship to one another. The painting was created in 1913, when Jaeckel moved to Berlin, and is likely to have been provoked by his examination of the new living environment. In this early painting, his orientation towards the painting and compositional style of Expressionism becomes clear.