, and also for Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party on the island of Croissy. Degas depicted her as a prostitute of the Parisian streets with a lost look, sitting absolutely still before a glass of absinthe, absorbed in thought. At her side, a pipe clenched between his teeth and a hat pushed to the back of his head, one of the café regulars is seated. He also seems to be looking into the distance, not aware of the woman seated just beside him. Squeezed into a corner behind little empty tables, they are almost touching one other, but each is in their own world. Again, Degas has succeeded in setting down on the canvas something almost impossible to capture: the bitter solitude of a human being in one of the merriest, liveliest cities in the world.

One of the main differences between Degas’ ideas and those of the other Impressionists was his point of view regarding open-air painting. For all the others, open-air painting was both an aim and an essential condition of their work. However, with Degas, it was not living nature that caused a landscape to appear on paper or canvas. On the contrary, it was a shape or a line seen at random that would give birth to a landscape in his imagination. Degas’ odd attitude towards landscapes had two explanations, however. Firstly, Degas’ greatest misfortune must not be forgotten, the weakness of his eyesight. What was most important, though, was that Degas had more confidence in his prodigious memory than in a fleeting impression.

The Orchestra at the Opera (detail), c. 1870.

Oil on canvas, 56.5 × 46 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Interior (The Rape) (detail), c. 1868–1869.

Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 116.3 cm.

The Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

The Ballet from “Robert le Diable”, 1871.

Oil on canvas, 66 × 54.3 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The second difference between Degas and the Impressionists was in his attitude towards drawing. Renoir and his friends had been accused of not knowing how to draw because, in their work, the vibrations of air and light had the effect of blurring their line; their colour predominated over their drawing. For Degas drawing always came first.

After the death of Degas’ father in 1873, the Degas family bank failed and there was nothing left for the painter but to rely on his art. Like the other Impressionists, he suffered from the fact that his paintings were impossible to sell and, like Renoir, Monet, Sisley, and Camille Pissarro, he went to Durand-Ruel to ask for money. And, like Sisley, he never painted commissions, he worked only on what interested him. He kept repeating, reworking, and varying his same favourite motifs, he liked improving himself. His friends recounted how he could start over and over again on one and the same work without ever fully completing it.

At the close of the 1870s, Degas added cabaret scenes to his repertoire – before Manet painted his Bar at the Folies-Bergère. What is represented in The Absinthe Drinker is, in fact, the work of a stage or film director. In 1877, Degas painted two paintings, Women on a Café Terrace, sometimes called Café, Boulevard Montmartre and Café-Concert at ‘The Ambassadors’. In these, the painter seems to be representing a moment glimpsed at random. Objectively and instantaneously the painter sets down on canvas the posturing, gestures, and expressions of the ladies as they chatter among themselves. “M. Degas seems to have hurled a challenge at the Phillistines, that is to say the classicists,” wrote the critic Alexandre Pothey in an article on the third exhibition of the Impressionists. “The women in