He led a short life (1867–1900) of verse, tragic love and family suicide, and wrote Absinthia Taetra, a tortured dedication to the drink. One was the poet Ernest Dowson, who assumed the mantle of his French hero, the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (also a fan of absinthe).
Even the colour of the drink may have had an effect on Lautrec, who commented that he felt haunted by colours: “To me, in the colour green, there is something like the temptation of the devil.”įrench art and attitudes found favour with a marginal group of English bohemians who adopted absinthe along with other habits from across the Channel.
The symbolist painter Gustave Moreau commented that Lautrec’s paintings “are entirely painted in absinthe”. His lifestyle inevitably influenced his work. Another, created for the legendary dancer Yvette Guilbert, was the tremblement de terre, made from absinthe and cognac. One concoction was the Maiden Blush, a composition of absinthe, bitters, red wine and champagne. He liked to experiment by adding ingredients. The disabled aristocrat famously carried a hollow walking stick which contained a draught of absinthe, and was occasionally accompanied by a pet cormorant that he had trained to drink it. Among the most prominent of these was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who illustrated the life of the music halls, the bars, the brothels and, in particular, the Moulin Rouge. An official report later remarked that many late nineteenth-century Parisian writers and painters gave themselves up to “the green” with passion in their quest for more original and exquisite ideas. While most of these artists remained relatively passive flâneurs and only occasional absinthe drinkers, some immersed themselves in the experience. In reference to one that he produced in 1876, he wrote: “It is a girl called Marie Joliet who arrives every evening drunk at the Ball Bullier and who sees with eyes of electric death.” The young Picasso painted several haunting images featuring absinthe drinkers, such as Woman Drinking Absinthe 1901, The Absinthe Drinker 1901 and Two Woman Seated in A Bar 1902. He completed Buveuse d’Absinthe in 1865 and repeatedly painted different models in the same pose for the next 30 years. The Belgian Félicien Rops was preoccupied with drawing women absinthe drinkers around the dance halls of Paris. This did not deter the avant-garde artists from creating absinthe-related pictures.
“It is you who are the absinthe drinker,”Couture told his pupil, “it is you who have lost your moral faculty.” Not surprisingly, when Manet entered the painting forthe Salon of 1859 it was rejected.”Insults are pouring down on me as thick as hail,” he told Baudelaire. (The rather incongruous glass of absinthe on the wall next to the man was added at a later date.) When Manet showed The Absinthe Drinker to his teacher, he was disgusted. In 1859 he painted a drunken ragpicker called Collardet with a broken absinthe bottle at his feet. The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, in particular, was developing theories about the relationship between art and life.”The painter, the true painter,” he wrote in 1845, “will be he who can extract from present-day life its epic quality.” One of Baudelaire’s friends, the young Édouard Manet, had just left the studio of Thomas Couture in 1858 and was determined to create a style that he could reconcile with the world around him. Its appeal coincided with a time when artists living in Paris were exploring alternative subject matter to the accepted genre painting. Soon street corner vendors were producing massive quantities for sale at just a few centimes a glass. This helped to pave the way for absinthe to become a drink for the people it could now be made cheaply with the use of industrial alcohol. The absinthe hour of the Boulevards begins vaguely at half-past five… but the deadly opal drink lasts longer than anything else.” With the devastation of vineyards in the 1870s caused by the insect phylloxera, the wine still being produced was too costly for the poor. Hugh recorded:”The sickly odour of absinthe lies heavily in the air. “The Green Hour”, as it came to be known, saw Parisians filling the boulevards, moving from one café to the next.
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