Stewart's (etching) (1934)

• Published: 1934
• Edition: Davenport 35; Johnson & Miller 78
• Limitation: Edition of 50
• Binding: Etching on white wove paper, full margins
• Dimensions: Plate 20.3 x 29.8 cm (8 x 11¾ in)
• Signature: Signed in pencil.
• Condition: Fine; a tiny speck outside the platemark.

Stewart's Cafeteria, at Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street, opened in the early 1930s and quickly became one of the few public places in New York where gay men and lesbians could gather openly. Cadmus recorded it in 1934, the year of his scandalous The Fleet's In!, in this etching and in the painting Greenwich Village Cafeteria, now at the Museum of Modern Art.

The crowded room is social satire in the tradition of Hogarth. In the painting, a man glances back over his shoulder on his way to the washroom, an invitation his contemporaries knew how to read. The print is one of the clearest records of queer public life in Depression-era New York, and Stewart's is now documented by the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.

Davenport 35; Johnson & Miller 78. Edition of fifty, signed in pencil, with full margins.