A woman sits in a Paris café with a glass of pale green absinthe, staring at nothing, beside a man in a hat who looks away out of the frame. The models were friends, the actress Ellen Andrée and the painter and etcher Marcellin Desboutin, posed in the Nouvelle-Athènes. Shown in London in 1893, it was condemned as degraded and read as a warning about drink.
Look closer
The café tables have no visible legs; their bare tops zigzag across the foreground and push the pair into the upper right. Their shadowy reflections appear in the mirror behind.
Looks like this
Compared by a vision model
