The two people in L'Absinthe are the actress Ellen Andrée and the painter and etcher Marcellin Desboutin, both friends of Edgar Degas, who sat for him around 1875 and 1876. They were not two strangers drinking at a café table, and the woman was not the drunkard that London later took her for.
The painting now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Degas called it Dans un café. The name L'Absinthe, the one the world uses now, came with the London showing of 1893 and the outrage that followed it.
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Those two friends were not sitting in a café when this picture was made. The Musée d'Orsay is blunt about it: the picture was painted in the studio, not in the café. Degas asked people he knew to pose, and he built the scene around them.
The café itself is real. It was the Nouvelle Athènes, on the place Pigalle, where the painters and writers of the quarter met, and the framing gives the feeling of a snapshot taken by a witness at the next table. The museum calls that impression deceptive, because the effect of reality is the result of careful work.
If the café was staged, so was the drunkenness. Two friends held a pose in a studio, and everything the world would later say about them came from what happened to the canvas after it left the studio.
What You'll Discover
Who the woman really was.
What the frame cuts off.
Why it vanished until 1892.
What London saw in the glass.
How it ended up in Paris.