At Grenelle, Absinthe Drinker

A woman sits alone with her absinthe in a dim cabaret, looking somewhere we cannot see. Toulouse-Lautrec painted her in 1886, and the man who ran that cabaret later bought the picture.

The story behind the painting

Toulouse-Lautrec painted At Grenelle, Absinthe Drinker in 1886, around the time Aristide Bruant opened his cabaret, Le Mirliton. The painter found many of his subjects there, in the cabarets and brothels of Paris, and Wikipedia notes that he was a heavy drinker himself. This canvas, oil on canvas and about 55 by 49 cm, was one of the first he devoted to the solitary drinker, a figure that would return again and again in his work.

What to look for

The woman has no name. She sits in low light at Le Mirliton with her glass of absinthe, and her eyes are fixed on a point in the distance. Most likely, the source suggests, she is watching the show on the cabaret's stage, but the painter keeps the stage out of the picture. What we are given is only her, the drink and the dim room around her, so the scene becomes less about entertainment than about a person alone in a crowd.

Meaning and intent

The lonely drinker was a common theme in French painting of the period. Wikipedia names Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir among those who took it up, and later Pablo Picasso in his blue period. Toulouse-Lautrec came to it early in his career and from close experience, since he lived much of his night life in the same rooms as his models. The picture does not judge her; it simply stays with her quiet, distant gaze.

Legacy

The first recorded owner was Aristide Bruant himself, the owner of the cabaret where it was painted. He bought it in 1905 and kept it until his death in 1925. Much later the Colombian artist Fernando Botero acquired it, and in 2000 he gave it to the Bank of the Republic of Colombia together with 207 other paintings and sculptures to found the Museo Botero in Bogota. In 2012 the Ministry of Culture of Colombia declared the whole Botero collection, this painting included, an asset of cultural interest for the nation.