The Absinthe Drinker

Manet's Absinthe Drinker, begun around 1858 and exhibited at the 1861 Salon, was his first major genre painting — drawing on direct observation of Parisian street life and his profound admiration for Spanish painting, particularly Velázquez's empathetic depictions of social marginals and fools. The subject — a ragpicker standing at a parapet beside his bottle of absinthe — was inspired by a figure Manet had encountered near the Louvre, the Chiffonnier Collardet, and drew on the Baudelairean fascination with urban bohemia and the heroism of everyday life in the modern city. Manet's teacher Thomas Couture rejected it furiously when shown the canvas before submission, declaring 'an absinthe drinker — and the painter who made this nonsense is an absinthe drinker himself.' The Salon rejected it, but Manet exhibited it at his own expense in 1863, the work establishing the confrontational relationship with official taste that would define his career. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, which holds the painting, possesses one of Europe's finest collections of French nineteenth-century painting, and this early Manet is among its most historically important works — the first full declaration of his radical program.

The figure stands against a shallow, barely differentiated background in the manner of Velázquez's court jesters and philosophers, the grey-green tonality of the ground rhyming with the sickly tones associated with absinthe. Manet models the ragged costume with broad, summary brushwork, rendering the social degradation through the looseness of the paint itself.