Two real friends who weren’t drinking

Degas did not paint L’Absinthein the café. This is the first thing to get straight, because the whole power of the picture is its illusion of a snatched accidental glance — as if you, the viewer, had wandered into the Nouvelle-Athènes, sat down at an empty table, and caught these two strangers in the corner without their noticing. That feeling is built. Degas built it in his studio, with two friends, over months. The “candid” is a construction.

Here is who he used. The seated figure in the painting, the woman with the lowered eyes and the glass of milky-green liquid, is the actress Ellen Andrée (1857–1925; pronounced “El-LEN ahn-DRAY”). In 1876 she was about nineteen, at the start of a career that would carry her through Paris theater into the 1900s. Andrée was a regular face in the Nouvelle-Athènes circle and a favorite model — she sat for Manet twice (for La Prune, around 1877, and Chez le père Lathuille, 1879) and a few years later Renoir would put her at the center of Luncheon of the Boating Party(1880–81), the giant Chatou river-party picture. (If you’re working through these sections in order, you’ll meet her again there. Same woman. Different mood entirely.) She was a working actress with a career ahead of her, not a streetwalker, not a derelict, not a fallen woman of any kind. Hold that thought; in two chapters Victorian critics will get it spectacularly wrong, and Andrée herself will have to come back, in 1921, to correct the record.

The bearded man beside her — in the dark, almost black jacket and the battered tall hat, with a clay pipe and a glass of pale liquid — is the printmaker Marcellin Desboutin (1823–1902; pronounced “DAY-boo-TANN”). Desboutin was Degas’s older friend, an artist himself, and a familiar Nouvelle-Athènes regular. He was a serious working engraver — meaning he made prints by cutting designs into copper or metal plates and pulling impressions on paper, a respectable artistic profession in its own right. He looked the way he looked in the painting because that was actually his face: a thick beard, a worn jacket, a quietly observant air. Manet was painting him at almost exactly the same moment (The Artist, 1875). Desboutin was the kind of man other painters painted because he sat still and looked like himself.

So Degas brought his two friends into the studio. He posed Andrée first — seated, in a pale dress with a pinkish-cream jacket, and on her head a large, light-colored hat — a soft lavender-gray, broad enough to throw a shadow across her brow — hands slack in her lap, eyes lowered. He set a tall stemmed glass on the table in front of her and, for the picture’s sake, he filled it with absinthe — the real drink, milky-pale after the louche. This is the only glass of absinthe in the painting. Beside Andrée he posed Desboutin: leaning slightly, looking off into nothing, his clay pipe in hand, and in front of him a small glass of pale liquid that is not absinthe. By long tradition and by Andrée’s own later word, that glass holds mazagran(pronounced “MAZZ-a-grahn”) — a cold, sweetened black coffee, served in a tall glass, that was a standard café drink in 1870s Paris and is roughly the ancestor of an iced coffee. (The name comes from a small Algerian town, Mazagran, where French soldiers in 1840 reportedly improvised the drink because they were out of milk and out of brandy. Whether that origin is exact or a soldier-story, by Degas’s day mazagran was just a thing you ordered when you wanted coffee but didn’t want it hot.)

So here is the picture’s first and most-violated fact: the two sitters posed for a painting about absinthe drinkers; neither of them was drinking absinthe. One is an actress with a glass of the real spirit set down for the picture; one is a serious printmaker with a cold coffee. They were portraitists. They were doing Degas a favor.

Around them Degas built the room. He almost certainly worked from sketches done on the spot at the Nouvelle-Athènes, then assembled the setting in the studio — the marble tables, the mirrored back wall(mirrors were the standard back wall in a fashionable Paris café in this period; they doubled the room and the gaslight, and they doubled the people, an effect Degas would push later in his café-concert pictures), the warm gas-lit reflections. The folded newspaper on the empty foreground table is a real period detail — the cafés stocked papers on wooden racks for customers to read, and a folded one left on a table is the sign of someone who has come and gone. The Nouvelle-Athènes as the picture shows it is recognizable, but it has been pruned. There are no other patrons. There are no waiters. There is no conversation. It is the room with the life drained out.

And then comes the decision that makes the picture modern. Most painters, given two figures, two glasses, and a café interior, would have centered the figures. Sat them comfortably in the middle of the canvas. Treated the room as a backdrop and the people as the subject. Degas did the opposite. He shoved his two figures into the upper-right corner of the canvas and gave more than half of the picture to a zig-zag of empty marble café tablesmarching in from the lower left at a steep diagonal tilt. That foreground is the painting’s largest visual fact, and it is empty. No people, no things — just tabletops, the bare canvas of a room that, in any other painter’s hands, would have been the painter’s job to fill.

This is the picture’s argument, made not in paint but in composition. Two human beings, pushed to the corner, taking up barely a third of the picture they’re supposed to be in. The whole rest of the canvas — empty tables, empty chairs, empty space — is what surrounds them. They are not the center of anything. They are an afterthought in their own room.

That is the picture Degas built. Two friends, sober, posed in the studio, surrounded by a manufactured emptiness, to make a portrait of being alone among other people. The fact that they weren’t drinking and weren’t strangers and weren’t even in the café is the joke under the picture — except it isn’t a joke. It’s the kind of careful staging that, paradoxically, makes the picture more truthful, not less. A real snapshot of two friends in a café would show them laughing. The truth Degas wanted — modern Paris, two souls in one room not connecting — required actors. So he used actors.