Bewley's

homage to Siohbán Cuffe

Near the windows on to the terrace, in an establishment I don’t usually frequent —O’Reilly’s pub on Paleisstraat in Amsterdam— it's possible to experience the World Cup's unfolding however you wish. Whether drawn into the drama of a match, hovering on the fringes —taking in only the cries of anguish and joy— or horror-marvelling from afar at the gall of one unusually unctuous host-president, or all of the above. . . .

My congenial corner is, once again, a vantage for self-contained observation of others and the scene all about. On either side of me are two framed prints by Siobhán Cuffe (Wallace), and I can'ttake my eyes off them. Both works take the viewer inside Bewley’s Café on Westmoreland Street in 1970s Dublin, Ireland.

Opened in 1896, the Bewley’s on Westmoreland was the beloved second in a string of Bewley’s coffee houses. It has since been “re-purposed” as a TGI Fridays and a Starbucks . . .

There were once Bewleys all over the place, with the flagship on Grafton Steet in Dublin (f. 1927) perhaps the last one standing. My friend Rossa in Amsterdam tells me of his mother's Bewley's china from a short-lived café on Shipquay Street in Derry.

The human subjects in Cuffe's etchings —somehow both simply rendered and curiously individualised— are confined to the bottom register. Along the bench by the back wall, or clustered around tables, with their teas and coffees, their newspapers and books, conversing about their intrigues and urgent affairs, they — the patrons — aren't the point. Little matter that the likes of James Joyce, or later on, Colm Tóibín, were once among their number.

A little scruffy, not a little self-absorbed, when not up to shenanigans, Cuffe's café-goers are dwarved by tall stained glass windows and even by the wildly art deco chairs on which some of them perch. (I'm especially transfixed by Siobhán Cuffe's chairs, their curly backs!) Her works are a celebration of space, of airy interior architecture. A small part of me expects that she has exaggerated things, while most of me doesn't care.

It's odd to be studying a suite of etchings of a Dublin café past and then drawing it — its dramas and denizens, its stained glass and its curls, its coffee urns — in Amsterdam. Or maybe not.

The first two, just below, show a little of Cuffe's Bewley's on Westmoreland Street.

They're followed by my bits of play in homage to her prints, then a photo of my congenial corner by an anonymous observer.

* drawings, watercolours, and photographs by Kenneth Mills, except for the first two.