The "Coffee House at Cairo," a canvas by Jean Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has been much admired. It shows the interior of a typical oriental coffee house with two men near a furnace at the left preparing the beverage; a man seated on a wicker basket about to smoke a hooka; a dervish dancing; and several persons seated against the wall in the background.
COFFEE HOUSE AT CAIRO—PAINTING BY GÉRÔME IN THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK
The New York Historical Society acquired in 1907 from Miss Margaret A. Ingram an oil painting of the "Tontine Coffee House." It was painted in Philadelphia by Francis Guy, and was sold at a raffle, after having been admired by President John Adams. It shows lower Wall Street in 1796–1800, with the Tontine coffee house on the northwest corner of Wall and Water Streets, where its more famous predecessor, the Merchants coffee house, was located before it moved to quarters diagonally opposite.
Charles P. Gruppe's (b. 1860) painting showing General "Washington's Official Welcome to New York by City and State Officials at the Merchants Coffee House," April 23, 1789, just one week before his inauguration as first president of the United States, is a colorful canvas that has been much praised for its atmosphere and historical associations. It is the property of the author.
The art museums and libraries of every country contain many beautiful water-colors, engravings, prints, drawings, and lithographs, whose creators found inspiration in coffee. Space permits the mention of only a few.
T.H. Shepherd has preserved for us Button's, afterward the Caledonien coffee house, Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, in a water-color drawing of 1857; Tom's coffee house, 17 Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, 1857; Slaughter's coffee house in St. Martin's Lane, 1841; also, in 1857, the Lion's Head at Button's, put up by Addison and now the property of the Duke of Bedford at Woburn.