Jean-François Raffaëlli
French, 1850-1924

The Absinthe Drinkers, 1881
oil on canvas
42 1/2 x 42 1/2 in.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco



Jean François Raffaelli - Self-Portrait, pastel, crayon and chalk on board, 1879

“I live in Asnières and I am attracted by the strangeness that surrounds all large cities. In Asnières there is the nakedness of earthen embankments, wooden shacks inhabited by extraordinary people, skinny horses, nondescript carriages, and stray dogs. I respond to all that, it answers a need I have for sorrowful charm, a love of strange silhouettes, and, also, a vague consciousness of high philosophy.” – Letter from Raffaëlli to Jules Claretie, 3 July 1880



Emile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh in Asnières, 1886. Photograph: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

COMMENTS

While living in Asnières, Raffaëlli devoted himself to documenting this suburban world. Eschewing the spaces of bourgeois and working-class leisure around Asnières and along the Seine, he instead sought out the small industries and permanent residents of the space in front of the city's fortifications called the Zone, the ragpicker cités, the shacks, and the empty spaces of the banlieue.

The exact location of the bar-à-vins or cabaret in “The Absinthe Drinkers” would be impossible to determine, but it can be understood as a synthesis of various existing drinking establishments. Raffaëlli doubtless imagined it lying somewhere to the west of Paris, not far from Asnières, perhaps in Clichy-la-Garonne near the rail line that connected the Gare St-Lazare and the suburbs to the northwest. As there were relatively few rail lines near Asnières in 1880, the possible locations the painting might suggest to a well-informed viewer would be limited. In any case, it seems to be modeled on an existing locale, as the artist used a similar motif several times.

At the time Raffaëlli painted his two drinkers, absinthe was becoming a widespread public health issue. A glass of absinthe had recently acquired the nickname "une correspondance," short for "une correspondance pour Charenton" — a ticket to Charenton, the insane asylum in the outskirts of Paris. (The irony of the railway in the background of Raffaëlli's painting could not, in this regard, have gone completely unnoted.) Absinthe was increasingly perceived as a health hazard, and the temperance movement in France came quickly to identify the drink as its main enemy. Absinthe had a much higher alcohol content than wine and was reputed to have quasi-hallucinogenic qualities, sometimes compared to the effects of opium.

“The Absinthe Drinkers” presented an image of the misery and incipient rebelliousness of a certain class of French society that seemed perfectly suited for such an audience. Indeed, the painting was originally exhibited under the title “Les déclassés”, and the artist clearly conceived it under this more specific, and more provocative, rubric of class degradation.

The meaning of this original title, perhaps best translated as The Degraded, yields a major clue to the work's social semiotics. In 1870 Pierre Larousse defined "déclassé" as "someone who is outside society, who does not occupy an admitted place within it," but the word also indicated someone who has fallen through the very floor of the social structure. Raffaëlli's painting thus depicted a location, an activity, and a social type — the banlieue, drinking, and the déclassé — which, when mixed together, offered a volatile cocktail to its original audience.

Above all else, “Les déclassés” was painted for the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881. Throughout the month of April, the canvas hung at the head of a large group of Raffaëlli's works and quickly became, along with Edgar Degas's Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, one of the touchstones of the show. For some, the two artists belonged to a schismatic flank within the Impressionist group. Following the fractious exhibit of 1880, in which Raffaëlli's contributions dominated the galleries and garnered widespread critical praise, Gustave Caillebotte prominently refused to show alongside him again. In Caillebotte's view, Degas's insistence that Raffaëlli be included in the exhibitions had been decisive in breaking up the sense of group coherence. Contributing to the perception of a schism within the ranks of the avant-garde, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, who had declined to participate in previous years, were absent again in 1881. The upshot of this crisis was simply that in 1881 Raffaëlli again dominated the exhibition. Though Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and others all contributed important works, Raffaëlli, with some thirty-four pieces, outnumbered any of them and captured the lion's share of public and critical attention.

Raffaëlli's composition consists of a series of rectangular planes parallel to the picture surface, receding into shallow depth. With the exception of the foreground chair and the man on the right, most of the compositional elements in the painting echo the surface of the canvas: the flat wall, the fence, the profile of the man, the side of the table, even the railroad shack at upper left. This compositional geometry encloses the drinkers within their own world, flattening and trapping them, as it were, in their inward delirium and extended reverie, holding them still.

Gustave Geffroy has emerged as the key contemporary interpreter of the painter's work: “One of them, preparing a cigarette with a slight movement of the fingers, reveals a skinny, brittle wrist, of an ill-fed and unsuccessful man: this one declares his hunger with his skeletal arm lost under the cuff, with all his body sagging underneath his shapeless clothes. His companion, hand fastened to jaw, a sideways look glittering between gray hair and hairy fist, looks all too capable of attacking in the dark, of burglary with forced entry, of committing a crime of need and anger. The prowler with inactive hands and this cigarette roller, dressed in faded frock coats, have sunk into a disquieting and reflective repose of vagabonds. Behind the branches of the climbing, dry plants, black and twisted like metal wire, in a false and reddish atmosphere of an autumn sunset where absinthe shines milkily, the idling of their weary bodies and the reverie of their troubles resemble the beginning of an ambush.” (Gustave Geffroy, "Jean-François Raffaëlli," in La vie artistique, vol. 3 (Paris: E. Dentu, 1894), 195-6)

Vincent van Gogh never concealed his admiration for the painter of Asnières. In July 1885, he wrote an extended defense of Raffaëlli in a letter to his brother Théo, in which he compared him to more academically inclined painters, and went on: "But he who paints, like Raffaëlli, the ragpickers of Paris in their own quarter has far more difficulties, and his work is more serious. Nothing seems simpler than painting peasants, ragpickers. and laborers of all kinds, but — no subjects in painting are so difficult as these commonplace figures!" (Letter to Theo, July 1885) Whatever Seurat thought of Raffaëlli, van Gogh's extensive explorations of Asnières and the banlieue in 1886 should be understood as a homage to both artists. Tellingly, when van Gogh and Émile Bernard had themselves photographed in Asnières, they played the role, more or less, of Raffaëlli's absinthe-drinking déclassés.

- condensed from Marnin Young, Heroic Indolence: Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaëlli's Absinthe Drinkers, Art Bulletin, June 2008, Vol. 90 issue 2, 235-259

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

This painting was the sensation of the 1881 Sixth Impressionist exhibition and is now considered to be Raffaëlli’s masterpiece. It was hailed by the prominent critic J.-K. Huysmans for its authentic reportage of “the sad land of the déclassés.” Dubbed “the Parisian Millet,” Raffaëlli was praised for his dead-on depiction of the homeless and unemployed, in this case, described by Huysmans as “seated in front of glasses of absinthe, at a cabaret under a bower where, climbing up, thin vines stripped of leaves twist, with their depraved paraphernalia of clothes in rags and boots in shreds, with their black hats whose threads have gone brown and whose cardboard has warped, with their unkempt beards, their hollow eyes, their enlarged and seemingly watery pupils, head in hand or rolling cigarettes.”

To Vincent, Raffaëlli’s insistence on the unromanticized truth of what he called “characteristic beauty” rang true and was
precisely what he would pursue in his own art.

- Through Vincent's Eyes, 2022