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When Manet finished this in 1859, he showed it to his old teacher Thomas Couture, the Salon painter he had studied under and then quarrelled with. Couture looked at the ragged figure and said the only drunk here was Manet himself, for wasting his talent. The rag-picker was a real man Manet knew from around the Louvre, and absinthe was still a new fixture of Paris life, cheap and faintly disreputable. Manet sent the picture to the Salon of 1859 and it was refused. Of the whole jury, only the old master Delacroix voted to let it in. Look at the empty bottle on the ground by his feet and the glass on the ledge above him, the two poles the painting hangs between.