At the Café represents a theme favoured by many European male artists in the 1920s: the solitary female seated in a coffee house. The subject is artist Mabel Lockerby (1882–1976), whom Heward knew well from the Montreal art scene. The dark coats and fedoras of the shadowy figures that appear in the background suggest men; however, Heward may have intended them to be read as cross-dressing women. The painting represents a female artist, alone, in a public space, and it directs us to the possibilities of queer spectatorship.