The Coffee House

In The Coffee House, Alson Skinner Clark painted Chicago on a winter day, with ice floating down the river and the city’s skyscrapers looming through smoke and fog. The State Street Bridge, with its characteristic curving ironwork, draws the viewer’s eye into the picture. Clark’s scene is in the tradition of the urban realism of the French Impressionists, recalling such pictures as Claude Monet’s Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare. Like Monet, Clark sought to suggest both the ephemeral nature of fog and smoke and the atmosphere’s effect upon the forms of the city.