In a Café (Glass of Absinthe or The Absinthe Drinker)

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In a Café (Glass of Absinthe or The Absinthe Drinker): Edgar Degas

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Edgar Degas Oil Painting - In a Café (Glass of Absinthe or The Absinthe Drinker)

Keywords: Café, Glass, Absinthe, Absinthe, Drinker

Work Overview: L'Absinthe (Dans un café)
In a Café (Glass of Absinthe; The Absinthe Drinker)
Artist Edgar Degas
Year 1875–76
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 92 cm × 68 cm (36.2 in × 26.8 in)
Location Musée d'Orsay, Paris

L'Absinthe (English: The Absinthe Drinker or Glass of Absinthe) is a painting by Edgar Degas. Its original title was Dans un Café.[1] Other early titles were A sketch of a French Café and Figures at Café, but when exhibited in London in 1893, the title was finally changed to L'Absinthe, the name by which the picture is known today. It is in the permanent collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Painted in 1875–76, the work portrays two figures, a woman and man, who sit at the center and right, respectively. The man, wearing a hat, looks to the right, off the canvas, while the woman, dressed more formally, and wearing a hat, stares vacantly downward. A glass filled with the eponymous greenish liquid is on the table in front of her. The scene is a representation of the increasing social isolation occurring in Paris during its stage of rapid growth.[citation needed] The models used in the painting are an actress, Ellen Andrée, and a bohemian painter and printmaker, Marcellin Desboutin. The café where they are taking their refreshment is the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes in Paris.

At its first showing in 1876, the picture was panned by critics, who called it ugly and disgusting.[citation needed] It was put into storage until being exhibited again in 1892, when it was booed off the easel. The painting was shown again in England in 1893, this time entitled L'Absinthe, where it sparked controversy. The people represented in the painting were considered by English critics to be shockingly degraded and uncouth. Many regarded the painting as a blow to morality; this was the general view of such Victorians as Sir William Blake Richmond and Walter Crane when shown the painting in London. That reaction was typical of the age, revealing the deep suspicion with which Victorian England had regarded art in France since the early days of the Barbizon School, and the desire to find a morally uplifting lesson in works of art. Many English critics viewed the picture as a warning lesson against absinthe, and the French in general. The comment by George Moore on the woman depicted was: "What a whore!" He added, "the tale is not a pleasant one, but it is a lesson". However, in his book Modern Painting, Moore regretted assigning a moral lesson to the work, claiming that "the picture is merely a work of art, and has nothing to do with drink or sociology."

Unlike his Impressionist friends, Degas was an essentially urban painter, who liked to paint the enclosed spaces of stage shows, leisure activities and pleasure spots.

In a cafe, a fashionable meeting place, a man and a woman, although sitting side-by-side, are locked in silent isolation, their eyes empty and sad, with drooping features and a general air of desolation. The painting can be seen as a denunciation of the dangers of absinthe, a violent, harmful liquor which was later prohibited. Parallels have been drawn with Zola's novel L'Assommoir written a few years later and indeed the novelist told the painter: "I quite plainly described some of your pictures in more than one place in my pages." The realistic dimension is flagrant: the cafe has been identified – it is "La Nouvelle Athènes", in place Pigalle, a meeting place for modern artists and a hotbed of intellectual bohemians. The framing gives the impression of a snapshot taken by an onlooker at a nearby table. But this impression is deceptive because, in fact, the real life effect is carefully contrived. The picture was painted in the studio and not in the cafe.

Degas asked people he knew to pose for the figures: Ellen André was an actress, and an artist's model; Marcellin Desboutin was an engraver and artist. The painting cast a slur on their reputations and Degas had to state publicly that they were not alcoholics.

The off-centre framing, introducing empty spaces and slicing off the man's pipe and hand, was inspired by Japanese prints, but Degas uses it here to produce a drunken slewing. The presence of the shadow of the two figures painted as a silhouette reflected in the long mirror behind them is also expressive and significant.

Degas’s painting In a café (The absinthe drinker) shows a couple seated side by side in a café, looking worse for wear after a long night. The woman stares into space with heavy eyes, her shoulders drooped and a pale drink (absinthe) on the table in front of her. Her surly companion stares off to the side, a pipe sticking from his mouth, his misshapen hat pulled down over his unruly hair. His glass is filled with a brown drink (possibly mazagran – a cold coffee beverage and hangover cure). The palette of muted greys and soft earth tones suggests stale air and melancholy.
This scene was both typical and topical in Degas’s time. Absinthe (also known as La Fée Verte or ‘the green fairy’) was a green coloured, highly alcoholic spirit. Poured over ice and served with water and a cube of sugar to soften the bitter taste, it was highly addictive and known to cause hallucinations. Its growing popularity and its negative social effects led to absinthe being banned in much of Europe and America.

The café pictured –La Nouvelle Athènes, in Place Pigalle – was one frequented by modern artists and intellectual bohemians. The painting is composed like a photograph, with its subject matter cropped at the edges and carefully balanced light and shade. Although it has the appearance of being made on the spot, the image was actually completed in Degas’s studio. Degas convinced his friends to models for the figures: Ellen André was an actress and an artist’s model; Marcellin Desboutin was an engraver and artist. Their reputations suffered as a result of the painting and Degas had to publicly declare that they were not really alcoholics.

This painting contains an element of social criticism, similar to that in Zola's L'Assommoir" denouncing the destruction caused by alcoholism. The last two customers at the café are seated in the right-hand part of the painting, with the gray reflection of the street behind them. The couple is surrounded by emptiness. The actress Ellen Andrée and the engraver Marcellin Desboutin served as models, but the painting goes beyond a mere portrait. They become the symbol of a nameless destiny.

Degas simply referred to this painting as In the Café, the present title was added later.

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L’Absinthe, by Degas, is the inexhaustible picture, the one that draws you back, and back again. It set 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… so does this master of character, of form, of colour, watch till the café table-tops and the mirror and the water-bottle and the drinks and the features yield up to him their mysterious affecting note. The subject, if you like, was repulsive as you would have seen it, before Degas made it his. If it appears so still, you may make up your mind that the confusion and affliction from which you suffer are incurable.
G.M.[GEORGE MOORE], SPEAKER 25 FEBRUARY 1893

We knew Degas to be a man of consummate genius…in the Degas we have execution equal to, though wholly different from Whistler; and we have a reading of character beside…Look at the old Bohemian- the engraver, Deboutin [sic]… The woman that sits beside the artist was at the Elysée Monmartre until two in the morning, then she went to the ratmort and had a soupe aux choux; she lives in the Rue Fontaine, or perhaps the Rue Breda; she did not get up until half-past eleven; then she tied a few soiled petticoats round her, slipped on that peignor, thrust her feet into those loose morning shoes, and came down to the café to have an absinthe before breakfast. Heavens! – what a slut! A life of idleness and low vice is upon her face; we read there her whole life. The tale is not a pleasant one, but it is a lesson. Hogarth’s view was larger, wider, but not so incisve, so deep, or so intense. Then how loose and general Hogarth’s composition would seem compared to this marvellous epitome…That open space in front of the table into which the skirt and the lean legs of the man come so well. How well the point of view was selected! The beautiful, dissonant rhythm of that composition is like a page of Wagner.
A PHILISTINE REMONSTRANCE, WESTMINSTER GAZETTE 9 MARCH 1893

Critics have in times past talked a great deal of rhapsodical nonsense about pictures that in spite of it all remain classic and beautiful; but is there anything in the whole literature of the subject quite to touch this about the “mysterious affecting note” of table-tops, mirrors, water-bottles, and drinks? … the “new critics” are in possession of the most of the weekly and several of the daily papers, and with one accord they tell us the same thing. These two sodden people are their ideal … when a new critic comes forward to set up a new standard … we are entitled to ask for his credentials. “Academic” is, in D.S.M.’s vocabulary, a term of derision … the subject is nothing; the use of paint, the handling, everything … If it is the object of the painter to cut capers upon paper or upon canvas…why, then the two sodden people at the café may easily be “ the standard”, for Degas’s performances are astonishingly clever. If you have been brought up in another way, and have been taught to think that a dignity of subject and the endeavour to portray a thing of beauty are of the essence of art, you will never be induced to consider “l’Absinthe” a work of art, however “incurable” your “affliction and confusion” … This is not a quarrel between one method and another- between impressionism and realism … It touches the whole question of artistic ideals, and in that matter, at all events, not even the humblest of use need entrust his conscience to a group of critics, however assertive and unanimous they may be…
WESTMINSTER GAZETTE 11 MARCH 1893

…D.S.M. assumes that because I object to L’Absinthe being paraded as a ‘standard’ of art, therefore I find Degas uninteresting. Not at all. I paid my little tribute to ‘the verve of the performance.’ I admitted its humanity. I don’t object when D.S.M. calls it a ‘lesson’… I only object when D.S.M. sets up these ‘two rather sodden people’ as a standard of art, and asserts that they are not ‘repulsive’. Here, I think, D.S.M. lets his admiration for the ‘handling’ confuse him. Fine painting it may be, but ‘fine art’ is a very different thing. When a work like this is set up as a standard of beauty, I think I discern the cause of the vulgarities and flippancies which are spoiling so many young painters.
W.P.H.‘THE NEW ART CRITICISM’, WESTMINSTER GAZETTE 13 MARCH 1893

…no artist can represent exactly what he sees. He is prevented by his material … be sure that his pictures will never fetch high prices. The painter has, however, a meaning, and we are grateful to a critic who is in his confidence, and can explain him to our ignorance. The artist can probably tell us something we did not know before if we are given the clue to his language… It is not forbidden to art to excite other passions than admiration. Pathos and horror are no more beyond he limits of plastic than of any other art … many men like tragedy, and it is clearly permissible to paint it.
That the defenders of the unusual, such as D.S.M.… should claim for it greater virtues than it possesses is not surprising. A discoverer always thinks too much of his novelty.
W. B. RICHMOND, WESTMINSTER GAZETTE 16 MARCH 1893

The English Impressionists ridicule subject and ‘literary art.’At the same time Mons. Degas is their god. Now L’Absinthe is a literary performance. It is not a painting at all. It is a novelette – treatise against drink. Everything valuable about it could have been done, and has been done, by Zola. Hogarth preached sermons likewise but he painted them; and quite apart from their subjects, or rather in spite of them, Hogarth’s pictures are great works of painting, interesting and complete in every sense. It would be ridiculous not to recognise M. Degas as a very clever man, but curiously enough his cleverness is literary far more than pictorial. This is the reason, I suspect, why a certain set of writers have taken him up; they confuse his painting and his story-telling powers.
D.S.M., SPECTATOR 18 MARCH, 1893

Is it, or is it not, a toss-up, when a Ruskinian stands before a picture like L’Absinthe, what view his sentiment will impel him to take of it? In one mood, no doubt, he will sternly lay it down that the most stammering and imperfect attempt to portray the Heavenly Host would be more worthy and noble than any skilful delineation of boors carousing. But cannot one almost imagine him turning on his too faithful disciple as he regards Degas with so shocked and disapproving eye, and lecturing him thus: ’There is no more pitiful symptom of diseased modern vanity than for a man who has learned neither to see nor to draw, to think that he can cover the idleness of his imagination, and the impotence of his hand, by the exalted nature of his subject. Nothing, forsooth, will serve him but angels whom he has never seen, and is not likely to see! Let him rather, with what of faithful vision and stern veracity is in him, picture some corner of this God’s earth, some table-top, water-bottle, or the like! Let him leave the angels to those who have seen them, and paint his brother ‘boozing’ at the Blue Lion. So it may be given him in time to behold also the Heavenly Host’. The one sentiment is just as good, just as misplaced, as the other; and all the time the picture has not been seen at all.
CHARLES W. FURSE, WESTMINSTER GAZETTE 18 MARCH 1893

… no one has ever been so foolish as to try and eliminate ‘subject from painting’, or to object to the presence of a literary idea. They have merely said that it can never be the raison d’être of a picture … the recognition of this fact in no way interferes with the axiom that a picture must, in the first place, be a great painting … Mr. Richmond believes that no one who looks at M. Degas’s picture can be interested in its essential pictorial qualities!! Which recalls the sayings of the late Master of Trinity that a certain person had plenty of taste, and all of it bad. For it is difficult to understand the frame of mind of a man who has devoted 30 years or more to the study of art, and then, looking at L’Absinthe, is unconscious of those qualities of draughtsmanship, design, and colour with which the picture teems.
However, I can assure him that any genuine admirer of the picture finds in its delicacy of selection, the subtlety and research of its drawing, and its curious charm of composition, intellectual beauties as completely satisfying as a great symphony to a musician.
‘THE NEW ART CRITICISM’, WESTMINSTER GAZETTE 20 MARCH, 1893

Mr. Charles W. Furse, everyone knows, is an artist of great promise, and before he took the French poison he painted manly, and to my old-fashioned taste, admirable portraits … It is just because of those 40 years of the study of the best art of various schools that the galleries of Europe display, I do not confound good and not good painting. It is almost a truism to state the fact that none but the most highly-finished work in any of the three arts will bear the tests of time. Perfect craftsmanship, such as was Van Eyck’s, Holbein’s, Bellini’s, Michael Angelo’s, becomes more valuable as time goes on. Time adds to its value. The qualities admired by this new school are certainly the mirrors of that side of nineteenth century development most opposed to fine painting, or, sadly, fine craftsmanship. Hurry, rush, fashions, are the enemies of toil, patience, and seclusion, without which no great works are produced. Hence the admiration for an art fully answering to a demand. No doubt Impressionism is an expression in painting of the deplorable side of modern life.
It belongs to the interviewing, advertising, inquisitive evolution, and, therefore, its existence is regretted by serious artists, painters, writers, or musicians.
Mr. Furse compares the pleasures he and his friends derive from L’Absinthe as equal to those of a musician listening to a great ‘symphony’. The vault paintings of the Sistine chapel are like a great symphony. The very limited little picture under discussion is like a string quartette [sic].
WALTER CRANE, WESTMINSTER GAZETTE 20 MARCH, 1893

Here is a study of human degradation, male and female, presented with extraordinary insight and graphic skill, with all the devotion to the realisation (or idealisation) of squalid and sordid unloveliness, and the outward and visible signs of the corruption of society which are characteristic of the most modern painting. Such a study would not be without its value in a sociological museum, or even as an illustrated tract in the temperance propaganda; but when we are asked to believe that this is a new revelation of beauty – that this is the Adam and Eve of a new world of aesthetic pleasure, degraded and not ashamed, a paradise of un natural selection – it is another matter.
The best answer is, perhaps, another question – How could one live with such a work? That is a test which never fails.
WALTER SICKERT, WESTMINSTER GAZETTE 20 MARCH 1893

Much too much has been made of ‘drink’, and ‘lessons’, and ‘sodden’, and ‘boozing’ in relation to the picture by Degas.
I know the work of Degas very well, and his titles, and his reasons for them; and I will hazard the conjecture that l’Absinthe is not his title at all. I would wager, though I do not know, that he called the picture Un homme et une femme asis dans un café. This conjecture, whether by chance it be correct or not, is my criticism on the criticisms. I need not elaborate the importance of its bearing. If l’Absinthe be, by chance, his title, it is to be taken as having no further intention than such title as Rubens’s Chapeau de paille. But Degas measures the exact range of a word as carefully and as unerringly as he does that of a line or tone.
H. S., WESTMINSTER GAZETTE 24 MARCH 1893

…D.S.M. seems to me sometimes narrow in his taste, but I feel bound to respect him for his attempt to show people that worthy commonplaces sweetened to suit the public taste is not art; and I believe that his advocacy of the purely painter’s qualities in a picture can do nothing but good.
‘THE NEW ART CRITICISM’, WESTMINSTER GAZETTE 29 MARCH 1893.

You have asked me to answer a question. How could one live with such a work as Degas’s L’Absinthe? For so the picture has been named, but not by me … as a collector my tastes are wide. Corot, Matthew and James Maris, Rousseau, Troyon, Constable, Gainsborough, Degas, Rembrandt, Reynolds, are all attractive to me.Hobbema and Crome, De Hooghe, Ostade and Mieris, Frans Hals and Terburg, all are beloved by the owner of the picture someone has dubbed “L’Absinthe’. Yet I am misguided enough to consider Mr. Matthew Marris, Mr. Whistler, and M. Degas perhaps the greatest living painters in the world … I have lived with L’Absinthe for many months. It was hung in a position which enabled me to pass and see it constantly; every day I grew to like it better. At last after frequent requests to sell, and wearied by the questionings of those who were incapable of understanding it, I exchanged it in part payment for another picture. It had not been away for 48 hours before I went back to the dealer, and, in order to recover it, bought another work by Degas, La Répétition. L’Absinthe then went back into its former position. Such is the influence of Degas upon one who has studied the great Old Masters all his life.

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Since the characters are known, this picture could be considered as an example of Degas's portraiture or, alternatively, as a characteristic glimpse of the Parisian café. The woman is the actress Ellen Andrée, the man Marcellin Desboutin, painter, engraver and, at the same time, celebrated Bohemian character. The café where they are taking their refreshment is the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes. Desboutin --- a popular figure --- seems to have led the move of those concerned with the arts from their previous rendez-vous, the Café Guerbois, to the Nouvelle-Athènes. It was frequented by Manet and Degas, by some critics and literary men as well as painters and had an interested observer from across the Channel in the young George Moore. The painting shows Degas's favourite device of placing the figures off-centre with a large intervening area of space in the foreground. A forceful and original composition results from the mode of arrangement and the dark but harmoniously related tones of colour and shadow.

Degas evidently retained in memory a moment when his sitters were in pensive mood. He did not seek to flatter them or make a `pretty picture' (an idea he regarded with horror). On the other hand nothing could have been farther from his thoughts than to depict these familiar acquaintances as monsters of dissipation and degradation in order to draw a moral lesson. It might be observed, incidentally, that Desboutin was drinking nothing stronger than black coffee! In England, however, the persons represented were considered to be shockingly degraded an by an involved piece of reasoning the picture itself was regarded as a blow to morality. So it appeared to such Victorians as Sir William Blake Richmond and Water Crane when shown in London in 1893. The reaction in an instance of the deep suspicion with which Victorian England had regarded art in France since the early days of the Barbizon School and the need to find a lesson at all costs that was typical of the age. George Moore in trying to defend Degas was as unperceptive as any. `What a slut!' he had to say of poor Ellen Andrée and added, `the tale is not a pleasant one, but it is a lesson', a remark for which he had later the grace to apologize.

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In a Café (Glass of Absinthe or The Absinthe Drinker)

Edgar Degas

Work Overview