L’Absinthe

Two real sitters who weren’t drinking, posed in a Pigalle café — and then mocked seventeen years later in London as a study in degradation.

1. 1
   Two people, pushed off into one corner

   Upper-right portion of the canvas — well above centre, well right of centre

   Find the two figures and notice how little of the picture they take up. Together they fill maybe a third of the canvas, jammed into the upper-right corner. Most paintings of two people put them in the middle. Degas refused. By shoving them off into one corner and giving the rest of the canvas to empty tables, he made the composition itself the argument — these two are not the centre of anything.
2. 2
   The one charged note of colour

   On the table directly in front of the seated woman, upper right

   Look at the tall stemmed glass in front of Andrée. Its liquid is pale, slightly cloudy, faintly green — milky rather than vivid. This is absinthe after the louche, the moment when ice water has been dripped through sugar into the spirit and turned it cloudy. This small glass is the only piece of charged colour in the whole picture — everything else is drained gray and dusty brown.
3. 3
   A staircase of nothing

   Across the lower-left half of the canvas, marching in from the corner

   Look at the foreground tables. Notice how they zig-zag: three or four marble tabletops at jagged angles, like a small staircase of stone slabs climbing from the lower-left corner up and into the figures’ table. They are nearly bare — one of them has a folded newspaper, and that’s it. No drinks, no plates, no people. This whole big empty foreground is the picture’s largest visual fact.
4. 4
   A stare into the middle distance

   Andrée’s face — the seated woman in the pale dress, upper right — under the broad light hat

   Look at her eyes. They’re lowered, turned slightly to one side, fixed on nothing in particular. The broad brim of her pale lavender-gray hat throws a soft shadow across the upper part of her face, dimming the eyes further. She isn’t looking at her drink. She isn’t looking at the man beside her. She isn’t looking at us. That blank, internal middle-distance stare is the painting’s emotional centre.
5. 5
   The man looking off in the other direction

   Right edge of the canvas, beside and slightly behind Andrée

   Find the bearded man. He’s a denser, more solid figure than she is — a thick, dark, almost black jacket painted in heavy strokes, a battered tall hat pushed back on his head, a beard that takes over the lower half of his face. In his hand is a long-stemmed clay pipe. His eyes are turned off to the right, out of the picture entirely. He and Andrée are looking in opposite directions — two people at the same table, twice as alone.
6. 6
   A room with the colour wiped off

   Across the whole picture — wall, tables, floor, figures

   Stand back and look at the whole canvas as a field of colour. Cool grays in the wall and the tabletops, warm browns in the floor, a near-black in Desboutin’s jacket, a dusty pink in Andrée’s jacket, a soft lavender-gray in her hat, and that one faint milky off-green in her glass. No reds. No bright blues. No sunlight — this is gas-lit interior, painted in the yellowish low light of nineteenth-century cafés. The figures are nearly the same colour as the wall behind them.