Fumeur et Buveur d'absinthe

Fumeur et Buveur d'absinthe (Smoker and Absinthe Drinker) places two figures representative of particular French social practices — smoking and absinthe drinking — together in what may be a café or drinking-establishment setting. Absinthe was both the fashionable drink of the artistic and bohemian world and the feared symbol of working-class addiction in the 1860s–1900s: it appears in Degas's famous L'Absinthe (1876) as a subject of social pathos, and Manet depicted absinthe drinkers earlier. Daumier's treatment of the subject predates the peak of absinthe anxiety in French culture, but the combination of smoking and absinthe drinking in a single scene establishes a type of male leisure associated with bohemian or lower-class café culture. The two figures may represent companions or simply adjacent café habitués, sharing the specific pleasures of intoxication and tobacco that were central to the atmosphere of Parisian drinking establishments.

The café interior creates a warm, enclosed space appropriate to the subjects of smoking and drinking. Daumier handles the figures with the loose, gestural approach appropriate to subjects defined by physical relaxation and the softening of social alertness that intoxication implies.