The empty foreground is the argument

The painting is small — about three feet tall by two feet three inches wide, roughly the size of a kitchen tray stood on end. It is portrait orientation, taller than it is wide, which is already a strange choice for a café scene. A wider format would have given Degas more room across the picture; the portrait orientation crowds everything vertically. That cramp is part of the feeling.

Now let your eye land on it. The first thing that should hit you is what is not in the picture. Almost the entire lower-left half of the canvas is given over to a pale, drained, gray-brown expanse of empty café tables. They are seen slightly from above, the way you see your own table when you’re sitting at it, and they are arranged in a steep, irregular zig-zagthat runs from the lower-left corner of the picture inward and upward — three or four marble tabletops at jagged angles, like a small staircase made of stone slabs. They are absolutely bare. On one of them — closer to the figures, partway up the zig-zag — a folded newspaper has been left behind. That’s the only object on those tables. No drinks, no plates, no people. It is a still life of absence.

The diagonal does work that is hard to overstate. It pulls your eye in from the corner nearest you and shoves it, against its will, into the upper right of the picture, where it finally hits the two figures. By the time your attention arrives at them, you have already crossed a desert of empty tables to get there. You have traveledthrough emptiness to reach two people. That is the picture telling you, before you’ve even read its title, that this is going to be a painting about isolation.

Before we walk into the figures, take in the palette— because the palette is the lens you’re going to read those figures through. The whole picture is drained: cool grays in the wall and tables, warm browns in the floor and the man’s jacket, a dusty pink in the woman’s jacket, a soft lavender-gray in her hat. No reds. No bright blues. No daylight — this is a gaslit interior, painted in the yellowish, low, slightly sickly light of nineteenth-century gas lamps, nothing like the daylit interiors Renoir would paint a few years later. Degas has wiped the color off the room. Stand back six feet and the whole picture looks like a wash of dust and smoke. Now, with that drained field in mind, walk into the figures — because they’re going to be drained too, and they’re going to be lit by that same sickly gaslight, and there’s going to be one small note of color that pulls the eye, and you need the drained field set in your eye first or the note won’t pull.

The two figures are pushed into the upper-right corner of the canvas — well above center, well right of center, taking up maybe a third of the picture between them. Andrée sits at the table closer to us, slightly the lower of the two. She wears a pale, almost cream-white dress with a pinkish-cream jacket over it; on her head is a large, light-colored hat — soft lavender-gray, broad enough to throw a shadow across the upper part of her face — worn slightly off-balance in the way Parisian women wore hats in this period. Her hands rest slack in her lap, not folded — slack, as if she has forgotten what to do with them. Her shoulders slump. Her eyes are lowered and slightly off to one side, looking down and away at nothing in particular. She is not looking at her drink. She is not looking at Desboutin. She is not looking at us. She is looking, as far as anyone can tell, at nothing. That blank, internal middle-distance stare is the most-discussed part of her face, and it is the part Victorians will read later as evidence of wreckage. Look at it carefully and you’ll see that it could just as easily be exhaustion, boredom, or the small private exhaustion of being looked at by a painter for the eighteenth pose.

In front of her, on the table, stands a tall stemmed glass of milky-pale, slightly greenish liquid. This is the painting’s one note of charged color — and you have to look at the canvas to feel how that works. Set against the drained gray-brown room you’ve already taken in, that small dose of green reads loud. It is not a bright glass. It does not glow. It is muted, slightly off-white. But because everything around it is also muted and slightly off-white, the eye finds it. Then the eye reads the title. Then the eye understands what the green is. The whole picture, in a sense, is built to make you find that one glass and name it. (Compare it, if it helps, to Monet’s Impression, Sunrise— same trick of restraint, where a single small note of warm color works against a drained field of gray. Degas does it cooler and sadder; Monet does it for dawn light. Same idea, different temperature.)

Beside Andrée, slightly behind her and to the right, sits Desboutin at the next table over. He is a denser, more solid figure than she is. He wears a dark, almost black jacket that takes up a lot of the picture’s right side — a heavy, lived-in near-black, painted in dense strokes — and a battered tall hat pushed back on his head. His beard is thick. In his hand he holds a clay pipe (the long-stemmed white pipes of the period, cheap, smoked everywhere). His eyes are turned off to the right, out of the picture entirely — looking at something we can never see, somewhere we are not. In front of him sits a small glass of pale liquid, plainer than Andrée’s, smaller, without the milky-green cast. This is the mazagran — the cold coffee. From the painting alone you couldn’t prove that. You have to know the story to know which glass holds what. But the visual fact is that his glass is not her glass, and once you see that the painting stops being a uniform picture of two absinthe drinkers and becomes a picture of two people who happen to be sitting near each other with two different drinks.

Behind them, the room. The back wall is mostly mirror— you can sense the reflected light of the gas lamps in it, blurry shapes that are the reverse of the room we’re standing in. The wall above the figures is a warmish gray. The whole back of the picture is brushed loosely, the way you’d lay in a background that isn’t the subject. The figures are also brushed loosely; nothing in the picture is finished to a polish. Degas — who in his ballet pictures could draw a tutu’s pleats with the precision of an engineer — has deliberately let the surface stay rough. The whole picture is a sketch held to the size of a finished painting.

Pull back one more time. The figures are isolated by composition (shoved to the corner). They are isolated by attention (both staring off into nothing, neither looking at the other). And they are isolated by the palette we started with — surrounded by, and bathed in, a flat gray-brown that doesn’t lift them, doesn’t celebrate them, doesn’t even quite distinguish them from the room. They are nearly the same color as the wall they sit against. They are of the empty room, not in it.

This is the picture’s whole quiet thesis, made visible in oil paint: that modern Paris puts two people at the same table in the same gaslight and they are still alone. The argument is not in any caption. It is in the composition, the palette, the eye-lines, and the empty tables. You read it without being told.