L'Absinthe is Edgar Degas's 1876 painting of two Parisians at a café table, now in the Musée d'Orsay. He did not give it that title. He called it Dans un Café, In a Café, and the name L'Absinthe only stuck after a London scandal seventeen years later.
Two friends posing as strangers
The woman staring blankly at her glass is Ellen Andrée, an actress who also modeled for Manet. The man beside her is Marcellin Desboutin, a painter and etcher and a friend of Degas.
Neither was the drinker the painting suggests. They were sitting for a picture, at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes near Place Pigalle, a real meeting place for the painters and writers of the neighborhood.
Panned in 1876, ignored for sixteen years
Critics who saw it at its first showing in 1876 called it ugly. It appeared again at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, then more or less vanished from public view.
An English collector, Captain Henry Hill of Brighton, had already bought it in 1876 through the dealer Charles Deschamps. It stayed in Britain, out of the French conversation, for years.
The auction that gave it a new name
After Hill's death the painting came up at a London auction in February 1892, where it was again met with derision. The Scottish dealer Alexander Reid bought it there for a client named Arthur Kay.
Kay lent it to the Grafton Gallery in London in 1893, this time under the title L'Absinthe. English critics used it as a warning about the French and about the dangers of the drink itself.
Kay found himself embarrassed by the outcry. He sold the painting to a Paris dealer within weeks, in April 1893, and it eventually reached the Musée d'Orsay.
Questions about L'Absinthe
Who are the two people in L'Absinthe? The actress Ellen Andrée and the painter and etcher Marcellin Desboutin, both friends of Degas posing as café regulars.
What was the painting originally called? Dans un Café, In a Café. The title L'Absinthe only appeared when it was shown in London in 1893.
Where is L'Absinthe today? The Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
Were the models actually alcoholics? No. Degas had to say so publicly after the 1893 London scandal, when critics assumed the painting was a moral case study.
Arthur Kay owned the most talked about painting in London for a few weeks in 1893, then sold it as fast as he could to be rid of it.
Read Edgar Degas: The Complete Story for the rest of his life and work.