The Absinthe Drinker

Manet was a born-and-bred Parisian who was the consummate flâneur. Observing urban life was especially timely, since Manet watched the modernization of Paris unfold before his eyes as Baron Haussmann transformed the city during the reign of Napoleon III (1852-1870). This transformation displaced many citizens, including beggars, ragpickers, street singers, and the like, who became popular subjects in art. The beggar-philosopher motif was already familiar to Manet from 17th-century Spanish art, and absinthe had first become popular in France in the 1850s; by 1862, there were 500 establishments in Paris alone that specialized in serving the liqueur despite an awareness of its debilitating effects. Manet created many versions of his absinthe drinker; this drawing is one of his last. The artist first created the figure in the late 1850s, resulting in a large oil painting, The Absinthe Drinker (now in the collection of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Denmark), which was rejected by the judges for the official Paris Salon of 1859 because of Manet’s use of a life-size, full-length canvas for the ignoble subject of a poor drunkard. His early compositions lacked both the bottle of liqueur and its accompanying glass, both characteristic of a contemporary drunk, but necessary for the depiction of the man as such. In the following years, during the early 1860s, Manet continued to develop this character in a number of etchings, this time facing to the right but still covered by a large, dark cloak. He also included the figure in The Old Musician (1862), a large oil painting now at The National Gallery in Washington, D.C., USA. Manet composed this character for the last time in lithographic ink between 1875 and 1880 in the work that now hangs at Hill-Stead. This composition features all three components that Manet worked over a decade to develop: the cloaked figure, the liqueur glass, and the bottle of absinthe.