L'Absinthe

The two sitters and the café

The woman is Ellen Andrée, an actress who modeled for several painters of the circle. Auguste Renoir put her in Luncheon of the Boating Party, and Degas drew and printed her more than once; the Art Institute of Chicago holds both a monotype portrait of her from about 1876 and a drypoint of 1879.

The man is Marcellin Gilbert Desboutin, born in 1823, a painter and drypoint printmaker who made portraits of Degas and of Berthe Morisot. The Musée d'Orsay names both sitters and identifies the room as the Nouvelle Athènes, the café on the place Pigalle where the Impressionist painters met.

The museum also says the picture was made in the studio rather than in the café, and that the snapshot effect was carefully built. The off-center framing, the empty space, and the cropping of the man's pipe and hand were borrowed from Japanese prints.

The title was changed in London

Degas called it Au Café, or In a Café. That is the title George Moore printed in 1893 when the argument was under way, and the Musée d'Orsay still catalogues the painting as Dans un café, with L'absinthe listed as the other title.

The name L'Absinthe belongs to London. The canvas went to England almost at once: the dealer Charles W. Deschamps had it in 1876, and Captain Henry Hill of Brighton bought it and kept it until his death. It sold again at Christie's in February 1892, at the second Henry Hill sale, and reached the Glasgow collector Arthur Kay.

Kay lent it to the Grafton Galleries in London in 1893, where it hung as number 258 under the new title. Kay later wrote that he had sold the picture and then gone back to the dealer within forty-eight hours to buy it again. After the row he sold it for good, in April 1893, to the Paris dealers Martin and Camentron.

The row of 1893

The Spectator's art critic, Dugald Sutherland MacColl, saw the painting at the Grafton on 25 February 1893 and made it the test case for everything he believed about criticism.

“But L'Absinthe, by Degas, is the inexhaustible picture, the one that draws you back, and back again. It sets a standard by which too many of the would-be 'decorative' inventions in the exhibition are cruelly judged. It is what they call 'a repulsive subject,' two rather sodden people drinking in a café.”

A writer signing himself A Philistine answered in the Westminster Gazette and gave MacColl's position the mocking name it kept, the New Art Criticism. The painter Sir William Blake Richmond joined in, calling the picture a treatise on drink and denying it was painting at all. The illustrator Walter Crane called it a study of human degradation, male and female. The critic Harry Quilter fought MacColl through the same pages.

MacColl replied on 18 March 1893. What matters, he told the objectors, is the dignity of the performance and not the dignity of the subject, and a good master of ceremonies knows how to introduce a beggar as well as a prince. The Spectator's editor shut the correspondence down in April with a bracketed line saying the controversy must end there.

The Studio watched it all and, in its first volume that year, suggested the whole quarrel would have evaporated if the picture had been called The Frugal Repast of Genius instead.

George Moore started the argument, then took it back

The Irish writer George Moore, then art critic of The Speaker, had described the painting before the row began and reprinted the description in his book Modern Painting in 1893. He named Marcellin Desboutin, said he had known him all his life, and wrote a hostile paragraph about the woman as a social type. He ended the passage by calling the picture a lesson.

In the same book he took that sentence back. He called it the first hypocritical phrase he had ever written and said a painting is only a painting, with no moral meaning to deliver. He blamed himself for having suggested that someone in the picture was being preached at, and said that once he had, the preaching started.

He also defended Marcellin Desboutin in print. Moore wrote that Desboutin was a sober man who always came to the café alone, as Édouard Manet and Degas did, and that he was sitting there thinking about his drypoints rather than drinking with the woman beside him. The Musée d'Orsay's own notice says the painting damaged both sitters' reputations and that Degas had to state publicly that they were not alcoholics.

Where it hung before Paris

The early exhibition history is less certain than it looks. The Degas catalogue raisonné lists a possible showing at the second Impressionist exhibition in Paris in April 1876, as number 52, and marks the entry with a question mark. The French Ministry of Culture's account of that exhibition lists Degas's contributions and does not include this picture.

What is documented is that it hung at Brighton later in 1876, from Henry Hill's collection, and that it was at the third Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1877, outside the printed catalogue. The Musée d'Orsay records the 1877 showing and gives no catalogue number for it.

Isaac de Camondo bought the painting in 1893, the year of the London argument. He left it to the French state in 1911, it was assigned to the Louvre, and it went on show there from 1914. It moved to the Jeu de Paume in 1947 and to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Half the canvas is empty furniture. The details follow the two sitters, what is on the tables in front of them, and the mirror behind, which gives back two dark shapes rather than faces.