Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). View source
L’Absinthe
- Artist
- Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
- Date
- 1875–1876
- Dimensions
- 92 x 68.5 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France
L’Absinthe, also called In a Café, shows a woman and a man sitting side by side at a café table in Paris. In front of her is a glass of cloudy green absinthe, the strong drink associated with the bohemian world. They do not speak or look at each other.
A closer look
The woman stares blankly ahead, her shoulders slumped; the man, pipe in mouth, gazes away out of the picture. The zigzag of the empty marble tables pushes them to the upper right, leaving an awkward void in the foreground, as if we were seated at a nearby table. Degas’s cropped, off-centre composition and his unflattering portrayal of urban loneliness made the painting controversial. When it was shown in London in 1893, critics attacked it as a lesson in the evils of drink.
History of the painting
Degas sold the picture soon after painting it, and it passed to Captain Henry Hill, a collector in Brighton. When it was exhibited in London in 1893, critics attacked it as a degrading image of drunkenness, and a fierce debate in the press made it notorious. The collector Isaac de Camondo later bought it and bequeathed it, with his large collection of Impressionist works, to the Louvre in 1911; it moved to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986.
