From Captain Henry Hill of Brighton to the Orsay

Here is the painting’s whole life as an object, the provenance — meaning the documented chain of who owned a work of art, from the painter’s hand to wherever it sits now. L’Absinthe has one of the cleaner provenances of any major Impressionist work, mostly because Degas’s friend Marcellin Desboutin wrote letters about who was buying what.

1876, straight off the Impressionist exhibition wall. The painting went to Charles W. Deschamps, a young London-based French dealer who had a gallery on New Bond Street. Deschamps was one of the very first dealers anywhere to specialize in the Impressionists for an English market — a brave commercial bet in a country whose taste in 1876 ran to slick academic figure paintings and well-finished landscapes. Deschamps acquired the picture for resale.

1876, almost immediately, to Captain Henry Hill of Brighton — and this is the fact the popular books most reliably get wrong, so we’ll spell it out. Hill (1812–1882) was a private English collector. He was not a club, not a society, not a charity, not a temperance organization. He was a man. By profession he had been a military tailor in London — he made uniforms — and he had retired wealthy to Brighton, the seaside resort town on the south coast of England, where he lived in a large house and bought paintings. He was, surprisingly for an Englishman of his generation and class, an early and committed collector of Degas: by the late 1870s he had seven Degas paintings, more than any other English collector of his moment. He bought L’Absinthe from Deschamps in 1876 and held it for sixteen years. (You will see L’Absinthe referred to in older books as having been bought by “a Sussex club” or “a Brighton club.” Brighton is in Sussex, but it was never a club. It was Captain Hill. The “club” story is what happens when historians don’t bother to look up the actual name of the actual man.) Hill even lent the picture out in 1876 to the Royal Pavilion Galleryin Brighton — its very first English showing, a quiet provincial exhibition that did not produce any scandal whatsoever, seventeen years before the London one.

1882. Hill died. His collection went to his estate. 1892. The estate sold off the Degas pictures at Christie’s in London, on February 19, 1892, lot 209, where L’Absinthe was listed under one of its early generic titles, Figures at a Café. (The temperance title had not landed yet — that’s still a year away.) It went for £180, a perfectly modest sum.

The buyer was Alexander Reid, a Glasgow dealer who was one of the most adventurous British buyers of French modern art in that decade. (Reid had actually shared a flat in Paris a few years earlier with Vincent van Gogh, whose portrait of him survives. He’s a more interesting figure than most provenance entries make him out to be.) Reid sold it on, in 1893, to a fellow Glaswegian collector named Arthur Kay. Kay was the dealer who, almost as soon as he owned it, lent it to the Grafton Galleryin London — the lend that became the 1893 scandal. (See the previous chapter for the noise.)

After the scandal, the painting moved fast. Kay sold it back through the trade — first to Martin et Camentron in Paris, then back through Reid in London — and by the end of 1893 the painting had landed where it would stay for the next eighteen years.

The buyer was Comte Isaac de Camondo (1851–1911; pronounced “ee-ZAHK duh kah-mahn-DOH”). Camondo was an extraordinary man — a Paris banker of Sephardic Jewish heritage whose family had originally been bankers to the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul before moving to Paris in the 1860s. He was rich, cultivated, multilingual, and one of the most discerning collectors of his generation. By the 1890s he had built one of the great private collections of Japanese art in Europe alongside a serious holding of French Impressionism (Manet, Degas, Monet, Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley) — at a moment when most of his French banking peers were buying Salon kitsch. He bought L’Absinthein 1893, while the London scandal’s ink was still wet, and put it on the wall of his Paris townhouse.

The Camondo story is also, eventually, a tragedy — though L’Absinthe itself is fine. Camondo died in 1911, and in his will he left almost his entire art collection — including L’Absinthe — to the French state, to go to the Musée du Louvre. He attached one condition: the bequest had to be displayed together, as a unit, named after him. The Louvre accepted. In 1911, L’Absinthe entered the national collection of France, where it has remained ever since. (Camondo’s son Nissim, who would have inherited the rest of the family fortune, was killed flying for France in 1917; his daughter Béatrice and her family were killed at Auschwitz in 1944. The family ended. The Camondo collection — and L’Absinthewith it — is the family’s surviving monument. The Musée Nissim de Camondo, in Paris, named for the son, holds the rest.)

The painting’s post-1911 movements are routine. It hung in the Louvre from 1911 until 1947, when the French national Impressionist collection was moved to the Jeu de Paume, a smaller museum in the Tuileries Gardens that became, for almost forty years, the main Paris home of late-nineteenth-century French painting. L’Absinthe hung there from 1947 to 1986, when the Impressionist collections were moved again — this time to the newly opened Musée d’Orsay, the great converted-railway-station museum on the Left Bank that opened in December 1986 specifically to house French nineteenth-century art. It hangs there now, on permanent view, in the Degas rooms.

A small grace note. The painting that Victorian London called a “study in degradation” in 1893 hangs today in a room in Paris where, on any given afternoon, several hundred people pass through and stand in front of it and look quietly at two figures in the corner of an empty café and feel, accurately, what Degas wanted them to feel — which is the very small, ordinary sadness of being two people at the same table not talking. The temperance frame is gone. The scandal is forgotten. The picture, finally, has been allowed to be itself again: a painting about loneliness in a modern city, posed by two friends who weren’t drinking, in a café full of empty tables that were never really empty.