Free Lunch

Three men sit at a bar counter, each clutching a tall glass—beer, presumably—that entitles them to the spread of free food before them: an empty plate, a dish of something picked over, a scatter of coins suggesting the last of a man's means. The figure at left, young and round-faced under a bowler, grins with unselfconscious appetite. The two older men wear battered hats—a slouch and a battered top hat—and carry the drawn, angular faces Gibson reserved for the down-at-heel. No caption survives in the catalog record, but the image needs none: the 'free lunch,' a saloon institution abolished by Prohibition, was already a byword for precarious dignity. Gibson frames charity as comedy without quite letting the men off the hook.