Urban Revolutionaries: 6 Demon drink

Long before cities gained their bright lights they had plenty of inns and taverns where folk could consume alcoholic drinks until they couldn’t pay for them any more. Persistent drunkenness has been recognised as a problem since ancient times, but it wasn’t until the latter half of the nineteenth century that its consequences on health were reported. Of course, alcohol abuse also took place in the country, but it was in the towns and cities that it became most obvious and destructive.

In French cities like Paris the main culprit was seen as absinthe, produced from species of wormwood plants, and claimed to contain addictive and destructive drugs in addition to its high alcohol content. It was developed in the late eighteenth century, and popularised the following century, particularly among artists and writers.

Edgar Degas (1834–1917), In a Café, or L’Absinthe (1873), oil on canvas, 92 × 68.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Edgar Degas’ famous painting In a Café or L’Absinthe from 1873 laments the fate of those who ended up drinking it. Pale green to yellow in colour, it was normally diluted with water, turning it cloudy, as seen is this woman’s glass.

Édouard Manet (1832–1883), Drinker of Bocks (c 1878-79), pastel on canvas, 61 x 50.8 cm, The Burrell Collection, Glasgow, Scotland. Wikimedia Commons.

Absinthe wasn’t the only route to alcoholism, though, as shown in Édouard Manet’s Drinker of Bocks from about 1878-79. Bock is a strong and dark lager originally brewed in Germany, and was often viewed as the start of the descent to absinthe and oblivion. Its equivalent in England was barley wine, with its similarly high alcohol content.

Jean-François Raffaëlli (1850-1924), The Absinthe Drinkers (c 1880-81), further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

In The Absinthe Drinkers (c 1880-81) Jean-François Raffaëlli followed from Degas, here with two down-at-heel men sat outside a bar.

Émile Friant (1863–1932), The Drinkers, or Monday’s Work (1884), oil on canvas, dimensions not known, Musée des beaux-arts de Nancy, Nancy, France. Image by Ji-Elle, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Drinkers, or Monday’s Work (1884) is one of Émile Friant’s first social realist paintings, showing two unemployed and unskilled men sat drinking together against an exterior wall. The hands of the more distant man are conspicuously grubby and unkempt, and a small dog looks on accusingly.

Jean Béraud (1849–1935), The Letter (1908), oil on canvas, 45.7 × 37.2 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean Béraud’s Letter from 1908 gives a glimpse into the café culture of the years prior to the First World War. The man looks rough, and is unshaven, although the woman is elegantly dressed, and apparently engaged in writing a letter. His battered old brown bowler hat suggests a working past before he succumbed to absinthe.

Jean Béraud (1849–1935), The Absinthe Drinkers (1908), oil on panel, 45.7 × 36.8 cm , Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

Béraud’s more academic take on The Absinthe Drinkers from 1908 reworks Degas’ painting, with its two glasses of cloudy absinthe, soda syphon, and jug of water. As a bonus, at the top edge he lines up a parade of bottles containing alternatives.

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen (1880–1922), The Drinker’s Family (1916), oil on canvas, 115 × 135 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

As with Edvard Munch and so many other artists, Aksel Waldemar Johannessen was prone to bouts of heavy drinking. In The Drinker’s Family from 1916, perhaps painted during a period of remorse over his behaviour, the artist here includes two self-portraits, as the young man at the right, and the wrecked alcoholic at the left.

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen (1880–1922), The Morning After (1916), oil on canvas, 77 × 89 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.

The Morning After (1916) is another self-portrait of Johannessen as a drunkard, his arm around a woman who pokes her tongue out in disapproval of his addiction.

Arturo Michelena (1863–1898), Charity (1888), oil on canvas, 288.8 x 231.7 cm, Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela. Wikimedia Commons.

The culmination of this descent is shown in Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888, where a pair of charitable bourgeois ladies have arrived at the hovel that is home to a young mother and her small child. Beside the woman, on a small table under the window, are a couple of bottles of her favourite ‘poison’, quite likely absinthe.