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A young woman in pink sits alone at a marble café table, cheek on her hand, an unlit cigarette between her fingers and a brandy-soaked plum untouched in front of her. Manet catches her mid-daydream, waiting for something that may or may not come.

The story behind the painting

Édouard Manet's Plum Brandy, also called The Plum, in French La Prune, is undated. Wikipedia places it around 1877, while Wikidata gives 1878. The scene may draw on Manet's visits to the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes on the Place Pigalle in Paris, but the decorative grille and gold frame behind the sitter do not match other pictures of that café. This suggests it was painted in Manet's studio, where he is known to have kept a café-style marble table on iron legs. The model was the actress Ellen Andrée.

What to look for

The canvas is small, 73.6 by 50.2 cm, and we see the woman from close by, as another customer might. She leans forward, her right elbow on the marble, her cheek resting on her right hand, looking into the distance. Her left hand holds the unlit cigarette. She wears a pink dress with embroidered cuffs, a white jabot, and a black hat trimmed with silk and lace, and her head is framed by the grille above the red banquette. The plum in its glass and the fingers of her left hand are made with just a few dabs of colour. The plum, a speciality of Parisian cafés, was first painted as a glass of beer.

Meaning and intent

The painting is a study in loneliness. The woman may be a prostitute waiting for a client, or a shop worker hoping for conversation. Ellen Andrée had also posed for Degas's L'Absinthe of 1876, beside Marcellin Desboutin, and the similar pose suggests Manet may have been answering that picture. But where Degas shows despair dulled by absinthe, Manet's sitter looks more dreamy than depressed, and the mood is more hopeful: her solitude might yet be broken. Andrée also appears in Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party of 1881.

Legacy

Manet sold the painting to the collector Charles Deudon around 1881. After Deudon's death in 1914 it passed to his wife and was sold before 1919, later entering the collection of Arthur Sachs, a long-time partner at Goldman Sachs. In 1961 M. Knoedler and Co sold it to Paul Mellon, who gave it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1971, where it is exhibited today. Its quiet theme of a woman alone in a public place returns in Edward Hopper's Automat of 1927.