Realism in the Age of Impressionism by Marnin Young

Author:Marnin Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

ABSINTHE

The evocation of a durational temporality was not limited to the experience of a geographic location but suffused the very action, however limited in drama, that the painting represented. If reverie was the effect most appropriate to a Realist painting of the banlieue, inebriation might very well have seemed among the most appropriate ways to attain it. Although relatively expensive until the 1870s, absinthe was by no means a new or even especially exotic drink in 1881. It had been popular among bohemians, dandies, and artists since the 1830s and became a legitimate avant-garde subject for painters fairly quickly. Manet’s first painting submitted to the Salon, in 1859, depicted an absinthe drinker, and Degas showed a painting of absinthe drinking in a Paris café at the 1877 Impressionist exhibition (fig. 98).65

Given the close relation of the two artists, Degas’s painting likely served as a model for Raffaëlli’s own depiction of the subject. At first glance, one might suppose that the younger artist took the existing iconography of absinthe—embodied in Degas’s work—and inserted it within a more densely layered context of spatial and class specificity. Yet the two painters were interested in, and achieved, different effects in their versions of absinthe consumption. Perhaps because Degas focused on a bohemian Parisian milieu—the setting appears to be the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes, and the sitters are his model Ellen Andrée and his friend the painter Marcellin Desboutin—the glass of absinthe constitutes only one drink among others, and the female figure’s lassitude and apparent indifference to her surroundings derive as much from exhaustion or boredom as from the drink itself. Absinthe has certainly not ruined her yet. Raffaëlli, on the other hand, zeroes in on absinthe’s effects of ruination on the lives of these two men.

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