L'Absinthe (In a Café)
1875–1876 · Oil on canvas · Musée d'Orsay, Paris
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About this work
- Artist
- Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
- Year
- 1875–1876
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original size
- 92 × 68 cm
- Collection
- Musée d'Orsay, Paris
- Movement
- Impressionism
A man and a woman sit side by side in a Paris café, not speaking, not touching, each staring blankly into space; a glass of pale green absinthe stands on the table in front of her. Degas painted it in 1875–76 and called it In a Café; the title L'Absinthe was attached when it was shown in London in 1893 to a scandalised press. The setting is the Nouvelle Athènes on the place Pigalle, the haunt of the city's artistic bohemia, but the picture was made in the studio, with the actress Ellen Andrée and the painter-etcher Marcellin Desboutin posing. Their reputations suffered enough that Degas had to state publicly that neither was a drunkard. The off-centre framing, which slices through the man's pipe and the tabletops, borrows from Japanese prints and makes the viewer a neighbour at the next table. It came to the French state in the Camondo bequest of 1911 and hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.
This print reproduces the whole work, uncropped, from a high-resolution scan of the original. The original is in the public domain.
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About this design
The Madten promise
An exhibition poster
The same artwork as a gallery exhibition poster — title, artist & date typeset beneath the image on a soft ground.
A fine-art print
The same artwork as a clean fine-art print — the image shown large with a minimal caption.
