The Absinthe Drinker is an early painting by Édouard Manet, completed around 1859, that is considered his first major painting and original work.
Manet began as a student in Thomas Couture’s studio in 1850, but grew dissatisfied with his master’s Salon style and opened his own studio in 1856. Little of Manet’s early work has survived, and much of it may have been destroyed by the artist himself.
The Absinthe Drinker is a full-length portrait of Collardet, a drunkard who frequented the Paris neighborhood near the Louvre. Collardet is primarily painted in shades of brown, grey, and black. Standing and dressed in an aristocratic brown cloak and black top hat, the subject is leaning on a ledge while holding an empty bottle that has been left on the ground by his feet. Later, Manet added a half-full absinthe glass to the ledge. The painting, which is a large-scale depiction of a commonplace subject and is influenced by Gustave Courbet’s realism, is 180.5 centimeters (71.1 in) high by 105.6 centimeters (41.6 in) wide.
Manet may have drawn inspiration from works by Diego Velázquez, especially his depictions of Aesop and Menippus, as well as Watteau’s L’Indifférent, as well as the poem Le Vin de chiffonniers (“The rag picker’s-wine”) found in Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 collection Les Fleurs du mal.
Manet showed his former master the painting as it was nearing completion. Couture is said to have retorted when asked for his opinion: “A lover of absinthe! And they paint such abominations! You are the absinthe drinker, my poor friend. You are the one who has lost your moral compass.” (As cited in Lainer and Adams, for example).
The Absinthe Drinker was Manet’s first submission to the Paris Salon in 1859. Only Eugène Delacroix voted in favor of it, and it was defeated. One reason for its rejection could be its subject; absinthe was thought to be addictive and morally degenerate, and this was one of the first depictions of absinthe in art.
But the painting also has some technical issues; the brushstrokes are visible in some spots, and the legs awkwardly join the subject’s body. Young painters’ rejection of other pieces eventually resulted in the establishment of the Salon des Refusés in 1863.
After 1859, Manet continued to make changes to the piece, and in his 1862 painting The Old Musician, he included the same cloaked figure.
The original full-length portrait was reduced to three-quarters by 1867 when Manet displayed it alongside 56 other works in a self-financed retrospective at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. However, by 1872, when Manet sold The Absinthe Drinker and 23 other works to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, the portrait was once again extended. Between 1867 and 1872, the glass of absinthe was a late addition.
The painting was purchased by the Ny Carlsberg Foundation in 1914 after being sold to opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure in 1906. It was then displayed at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. It was among the first contemporary pieces to be added to the collection at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, where it is still kept today.
