Intro source: Wikipedia (EN)
Degas used real people as models: the woman is actress and artist's model Ellen Andrée, and the man is engraver Marcellin Desboutin — neither of them were drinkers, which makes the painting's air of stupefied misery entirely Degas's own invention — a piece of staged theater dressed up as an unflinching slice of real life.
Highlights
Facts & legends
- When L'Absinthe was shown in London in 1893, British critics were so offended by its subject matter — a hollow-eyed woman slumped over a glass of absinthe — that it sparked a public debate in the press about whether depicting degradation could ever be considered art.
- Degas used real people as models: the woman is actress and artist's model Ellen Andrée, and the man is engraver Marcellin Desboutin — neither of them were drinkers, which makes the painting's air of stupefied misery entirely Degas's invention.
- The painting sat unsold in Degas's studio for years; it was bought by a British collector, Henry Hill of Brighton, in 1876 for just £180, and the art world largely ignored it until the 1893 London exhibition turned it into a scandal.
- X-ray analysis has revealed that Degas made significant compositional changes during painting, including shifting the position of the figures and reworking the table arrangement to create the uncomfortable psychological gap between the two figures.
- The drink in the woman's glass is a pale, milky green — the actual color of absinthe — and the bottle of absinthe visible on the table left is one of the few explicit clues Degas planted, since the title was not the original one he exhibited it under.
- After its London scandal, the painting was auctioned in 1892 and bought back into French hands; it eventually entered the Musée d'Orsay collection, where it hangs today as one of the most psychologically uncomfortable paintings in Impressionism.
More details How a staged studio scene became an image of urban loneliness: what the canvas shows, the visual language it grew from, the road the picture took from Brighton to the Musée d'Orsay, and why a glass of absinthe turned into a public scandal.
Two strangers at an empty table
What the canvas actually shows
Two people sit side by side at joined marble café tables, but look in opposite directions. The woman, in a bonnet and a buttoned-up dress, stares at the floor, her hands slack in her lap; in front of her stands a glass of cloudy, greenish liquid — real absinthe. The man beside her, in a flat cap, holds a pipe and looks off past her; in front of him sits a mazagran, iced coffee once used as a hangover remedy. Many viewers miss this second glass entirely and read the scene as a portrait of the woman alone.
The foreground is left almost empty: bare tabletops fill the lower half of the canvas before the eye even reaches the figures, pushed into the upper right corner. Behind them, a mirror reflects only dark, featureless shapes. The palette stays muted — earthy browns, greys and olive tones — with the greenish glint of the glass as the single accent. The oil on canvas measures roughly 92 by 68 centimetres.
The café's tables were genuine marble-topped surfaces, standard furniture in Parisian cafés of the period. The light inside is diffuse, without sharp shadows, which flattens the scene and gives it something of the look of a photographic frame. Nothing in the clothing or setting fixes an exact time of day — only a general sense of a stalled, empty hour.
A staged scene, not a sketch
How Degas built the café in his studio
Despite its snapshot look, Degas painted the picture in his studio between 1875 and 1876, not on location. He asked two acquaintances to pose as the sitters: the actress Ellen Andrée played the woman, the painter and engraver Marcellin Desboutin the man. Neither was portraying their own life — this was a constructed tableau, not a documentary record of real drinkers.
The setting was a genuine Paris address, the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes on Place Pigalle, a real meeting place for artists and writers, Manet and Zola among them. But a real café did not make the method reportorial: the asymmetric framing, the empty foreground and the sense of figures caught by accident were carefully calculated. The picture first circulated under titles such as In a Café, Sketch of a French Café and Figures at a Café; shown that way at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, it already drew critics who called it ugly and disgusting.
Degas belonged to the circle of painters the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire had urged to become 'painters of modern life,' and the café on Place Pigalle served almost as that circle's headquarters — the same address is sometimes called a meeting point of the so-called Batignolles group, which included Manet, Degas and the younger Impressionists. Marcellin Desboutin, who played the man, appears as a recognisable sitter in other works by Degas too; he was not a stranger pulled off the street but part of this artistic circle.
A print, a photograph, a novel about ruin
The visual vocabulary Degas drew on
The cropped, off-centre composition owes a debt to Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, fashionable in 1870s Paris, and to the new snapshot aesthetic of instant photography. Both broke with academic symmetry, which placed principal figures at the centre of the canvas. In Degas's hands the asymmetry becomes more than decorative borrowing — the empty space between viewer and sitters keeps them apart.
A similar interest in the shadowed side of Parisian leisure runs through Édouard Manet's earlier café-concert scenes and solitary drinkers. The picture is often paired with Émile Zola's novel about ruinous alcoholism, L'Assommoir — though the book appeared a year after the painting, so this is a shared theme in naturalist culture rather than a direct source. Degas regularly exhibited alongside Renoir and Monet, and the same Impressionist circle produced Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette and Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare series and Haystacks — each artist choosing a different corner of modern life, from the dance hall to the railway to the café table.
Manet himself had an early parallel: his 1859 painting The Absinthe Drinker, showing a solitary drinker on a Paris street, which the official Salon jury had likewise rejected as too low a subject. Degas need not have had that specific canvas in mind, but the generation's interest in the lone urban drinker predates L'Absinthe and continued well after it.
From Brighton to the Musée d'Orsay
The picture's long road to a museum wall
The painting's first owner was the English collector Captain Henry Hill of Brighton, who bought it right after the 1876 exhibition. It stayed with him until 1892, when it was sold at Christie's in London — reportedly hissed on the easel by the room. It then passed through several dealers — Alexander Reid and Arthur Kay in Glasgow, the Paris firm Martin & Camentron, then Reid again — and, under the new title L'Absinthe, was shown in 1893 at London's Grafton Galleries, where it set off the loud scandal in the British press.
Around that same year, 1893, the painting was bought by the Paris collector Count Isaac de Camondo, who kept it until his death in 1911, when it passed to the Louvre under his bequest. From there, in 1986, when the Musée d'Orsay opened, the canvas moved with the rest of the Impressionist collection to its current home. The museum's official title remains In a Café; L'Absinthe is listed as the alternate name that became common usage.
The organiser of the 1893 London show where the painting earned its scandalous fame was the Society of French Artists, exhibiting at the Grafton Galleries — a recognised institutional venue on the British art scene, which gave the ensuing controversy extra weight rather than letting it pass as a minor gallery incident.
The glass that became a legend
How a staged scene turned into a symbol of an age
The 1893 London scandal struck the models as hard as the painting: Ellen Andrée had to state publicly that she was not a drunk or a fallen woman, but an actress who had played a part. The canvas landed at the centre of British arguments about the dangers of drink, the vulgarity of French manners and the limits of acceptable subject matter in painting — read not as art but as a document and a warning.
Absinthe itself, the green fairy, was banned in France only in 1915, partly amid the same moral panic this painting had helped fix in the public mind. Today the work is read more broadly: not as an illustration of vice but as one of the first convincing images of urban loneliness inside a crowd, a mood later artists of very different styles returned to when painting empty bars and silent café patrons. Degas himself long avoided showing the picture to the wider public, wary of exactly the moralizing readings that eventually caught up with it anyway.
The theme of the solitary café drinker did not end with Degas: in the early 1900s a young Pablo Picasso picked it up in a very different register with Woman Drinking Absinthe (1901), one of the first clear gestures of his Blue Period. The same motif — a glass of absinthe and a lone figure at a table — kept resurfacing in European painting across several decades.
Official sources
Where to check
- Official institution site Musee d'Orsay
- In a Café, or Absinthe: record and historyMusée d'Orsay, Paris
- Art and society, 1848–1914Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Visual context
