Absinth

The two people slumped at this café table were not down-and-outs at all. The woman is Ellen Andrée, an actress Degas knew, and the man is Marcellin Desboutin, a painter and printmaker, both of them friends who posed in the studio while Degas set the scene in the Nouvelle-Athènes, the café where the Impressionists actually gathered in Paris in the 1870s. He made them look so worn and vacant, her glass of pale green absinthe sitting untouched in front of her, that the picture caused real trouble. When it went on show in London in 1893 under the name L'Absinthe, viewers took it as a lesson in moral ruin, and both sitters found their reputations questioned. Degas had to state publicly that neither was a drunk. Look at how he built it. The table edges run out toward you like empty steps, pushing the couple back into a corner, and the two of them never quite meet the eye or each other. Absinthe itself would be banned in France in 1915, two years before Degas died.