When Edgar Degas’s L’Absinthe came up for auction at Christie’s in London in 1892, there were hisses in the saleroom – an incident which tells us at least as much about the sharpening of the British public’s ability to interpret his paintings as it does about late Victorian morals. To an untrained eye, this notorious painting of a slightly slumped and haggard couple sitting in a Parisian café, looking appropriately pensive, doesn’t immediately scream indecency. The Brighton-based collector Henry Hill purchased it in 1876 and exhibited it with the title A Sketch at a French Café , eliciting little reaction.
But by the time Hill’s estate was sold at Christie’s, those little visual clues so characteristic of Degas were well understood. That green tinge to the woman’s glass is not light refracting through water. The shadows she and her companion cast at wide angles on the fierce white curtain behind are the product not of the gentle light of late afternoon, but of the coming of dawn.
She is probably a prostitute; he might be her companion at the end of a long binge, or he might be in the process of being solicited. The painting was bought at Christie’s by the dealer Alex Reid on behalf of the Glasgow collector Arthur Kay, who sold it back to Reid a couple of months later, bought it back from him again within 48 hours, allowed it to be exhibited with the more provocative title L’Absinthe at the Grafton Gallery in 1893, and then, most likely fed up with th.