Sitters are the actress Ellen Andre and the painter Macellin Deboutin both friends of Degas Impressionism
Oil of canvas, Musee d’Orsay, Paris. This notorious painting of a woman stupefied by the toxic beverage absinthe (known as the ‘green fairy’) was produced by Degas in his studio with the cooperation of an actress, Ellen Andrew, and a printmaker friend, Marcellin Desboutin. The picture was immediately condemned as a disreputable scene from the Cafe de la Nouvelle Athenes in Place Pigalle, a well-known bohemian drinking hole and the reputations of Andre and Desboutin were harmed, to their dismay. The jolting sense of candid reality in Degas’s scene owes much to the unconventional, angular viewpoints of Japanese prints and demonstrates his maxim that ‘no art is less spontaneous than mine’.