You can be surrounded by people and feel completely alone. A packed metro, a busy café, a city of millions where nobody knows your name. It's one of the most modern feelings there is.
Some painters noticed it long before we talked about it. Looking at their work won't make the loneliness disappear. But it can make it feel less solitary: someone, somewhere, saw exactly this, and thought it was worth painting.
Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882, Courtauld Gallery, London)
A young barmaid stands behind a marble counter, bottles and oranges in front of her. In the mirror behind her, the whole music hall glitters: chandeliers, a balcony full of faces, the feet of a trapeze artist in the top corner. She is at the center of the busiest room in Paris, and her eyes are somewhere else entirely. Manet doesn't tell us what she's thinking. He only shows us how far away she seems from all that noise.
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Edvard Munch, Evening on Karl Johan Street (1892, KODE, Bergen)
An evening crowd walks down the main street of Kristiania, today's Oslo, straight toward us. Their faces are pale, almost like masks, their eyes wide and fixed. And on the road, one dark figure walks the other way, alone. Munch painted the feeling of being out of step with everyone around you, a year before he painted The Scream.
Edgar Degas, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (1875–76, Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
Two people sit side by side on a café bench in Paris, a woman and a man, close enough to touch. Neither looks at the other. Her gaze is far away. It's a painting about being together and apart at the same time, a feeling anyone who has shared a table in silence will recognize.
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Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877, Art Institute of Chicago)
A wide, wet Parisian crossroads, elegant passers-by under their umbrellas. Everyone is close, and everyone is in their own small dome of shelter. It's beautiful and a little melancholy, the city as a place where we brush past each other without meeting.
What these paintings offer
Spend a few minutes with one of them. Find the figure you feel closest to. Imagine what they're thinking, what they're hoping for, who they wish were sitting beside them. Then notice the gentle paradox: in recognizing their loneliness, you've just kept them company.
A letter that finds you
When the city feels too big, a letter can make it smaller. The Letter & Magazine subscription sends a letter and a postcard every month, written to be read slowly, with a meditation and a story about art inside, plus a seasonal issue of "(meditating) On Art". Proof, every month, that someone was thinking of you.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi