1876 in Paris, 1893 in London

In April 1876, in Paris, Dans un café — that was its title then, “In a Café,” not yet L’Absinthe — went on the wall at the Second Impressionist Exhibition. The show was at rue Le Peletier, in a rented gallery space, the second of the eight exhibitions the Impressionist group would mount between 1874 and 1886. Degas hung roughly two dozen works in that show; Dans un café was one of them.

The Paris reception was unkind, but it was not a scandal. Some critics called the two figures “ugly and disgusting.” A few liked the picture. Most simply moved on to the next painting on the wall. This was, after all, an exhibition of dozens of Impressionist works whose looseness and rough finish were the larger story; one more rough Degas with two slumped figures was not the day’s headline. The painting was noticed, was criticized, was sold, and went off into private hands — specifically into the hands of a retired English military tailor named Captain Henry Hill, who hung it in his house in Brighton, where it would sit for the next sixteen years. (We’ll come back to Hill at length in the next chapter; for now just hold the name, because he’s the entire reason the picture survived its first decade in obscurity instead of being lost in some London resale.)

There, in Brighton, the picture sat. Now skip seventeen years.

1893.Paris is a different city. The Impressionists, who in 1876 were a band of insurgents being mocked in print, are now successful, middle-aged painters with international reputations and rising prices. Andrée is still working. Desboutin is still printmaking. The painting — sold out of Hill’s estate at Christie’s in February 1892, picked up by a Glasgow dealer, then sold on to another Glasgow collector — has been bouncing around the British art trade and is about to surface in London. And in London in 1893, the painting will detonate.

The venue is the Grafton Gallery, also written Grafton Galleries, on Grafton Street in central London. It was a commercial gallery — not a public museum, but a high-toned rental room where dealers mounted paying exhibitions — that ran from 1893 into the 1920s and would shortly become a major venue for showing French modernism to British audiences. (It is the same room that, in 1910, would host the show that introduced post-Impressionism to England.) In early 1893, the Glasgow dealer Arthur Kay, who had bought the Degas, lent it to a Grafton mixed exhibition of works for sale.

And the picture was hung — and titled, in English, L’Absinthe. This is the moment the title fixes. Not in Degas’s studio, not in 1876, not in French. In London, in 1893, in English, on the wall of the Grafton Gallery. The French title Dans un café — neutral, descriptive, just “In a Café” — was set aside, and the picture was renamed for the drink in the woman’s hand. From that moment on, in every language and every catalogue, the painting is L’Absinthe. The title that we use is a London title, and an 1893 title, and not the painter’s.

The renaming was not innocent. By 1893 the temperance movement — the campaign to ban or restrict alcohol that was already running hard across Britain and the United States — had absinthe in its sights. Medical journals were reporting cases of “absinthism,” a supposed condition of madness and hallucination caused specifically by the wormwood. Newspapers ran scare stories. (Whether absinthe was actually more dangerous than any other 70%-alcohol spirit is a question modern chemistry has answered with a fairly firm “no”; in 1893 nobody had answered it yet.) By calling the picture L’Absinthe, the gallery — wittingly or not — handed Victorian critics a temperance subject, fully framed. And Victorian critics took it.

The reviews were savage. The artist and critic Walter Crane — a prominent Arts-and-Crafts figure, illustrator, and socialist, not some anonymous newsroom hack — wrote that the painting was a “study in degradation.” That single phrase, from a named and visible cultural figure, was the line that stuck and traveled. Others called the figures “loathsome,” the picture “uncouth,” the scene “a warning.” The novelist George Moore, an Anglo-Irish writer who had actually lived in Paris and known the Nouvelle-Athènes circle, weighed in on both sides — first echoing the moralizing language, then publicly recanting in print and writing that “the picture is merely a work of art, and has nothing to do with drink or sociology.” But the recantation came later. The first wave was the savaging.

What was a scandal here, exactly? Use the word plainly. A scandal in this period meant a public uproar over a moral offense — typically about sex, drink, or class — that gets fought out in newspapers and lecture halls and at dinner parties. The 1893 L’Absinthe scandal was that kind of uproar: a painting that the gallery had hung as an attractive French Impressionist work was being read by London press as a piece of dirty French propaganda for vice, and the debate ran for weeks across the newspapers.

The two sitters had now spent seventeen years being completely ordinary people leading their own lives. They were not asked. They were not consulted. And suddenly, in London, journalists who had never met them were arguing whether they were degenerates. Andrée, who was thirty-six and a working Paris actress, was being described, in the British press, as a drunk and worse. Desboutin, who was seventy and a distinguished printmaker, was being described as a wreck.

It is at this point — though the full record of her response is Andrée’s later interview with the critic Félix Fénéon, given in 1921, forty-five years after she sat — that Andrée publicly set the record straight. The story she told is the careful one, not the dramatic one. She did not deny that she had posed. She had posed, willingly, for her friend Degas. She corrected the interpretation. Yes, the glass in front of her in the picture held absinthe — Degas put it there for the painting. No, in real life she was not an absinthe drinker. And the man beside her, Desboutin — by her telling, he was the one who actually drank, and what was in his glass in the picture wasn’t absinthe at all but mazagran. (That last detail — Desboutin as the real drinker — is Andrée’s own recollection in 1921, not independent corroboration; it’s her account, kept attributed to her, not promoted to documentary fact.) The painting, in other words, had been a careful artistic construction, posed by two sober friends. The reading of it as a documentary record of two alcoholics had got every fact wrong.

Desboutin’s defenders made the same case for him in 1893, while he was still alive (he would die in 1902, nine years after the London scandal): he was not a drunk, he was a respected printmaker, he had posed for his friend.

The whole episode is a study in what a title can do. The painting in 1876 had been called Dans un café and was read, mostly correctly, as a downbeat picture of two figures in a Paris bar. The painting in 1893 was called L’Absinthe and was read as a temperance tract. Same picture. Same paint. Different title. Different country. Different decade. Different scandal. The picture had not moralized about anything; the moralizing arrived from outside it, attached to a noun in the title.

And the title stuck. It stuck because scandals are sticky, and because the renamed picture was now famous, and because once a great painting acquires a famous name in a famous fight, you can’t really take it back. By the time the painting moved on to its next owner, two months later, it was L’Absinthe everywhere, and no one was calling it Dans un café anymore. The London Victorians did what the Paris show in 1876 had failed to do: they made the painting unforgettable. They just had to malign it first.