Alternatively, if you reside in Victoria Australia, we can make arrangements for you to visit my studio in Williamstown to view and to purchase the artwork.

The two figures in this painting are Ellen Andree, a noted French Actress, and Marcellin Desboutin, an artist and noted bohemian personality, sitting at the Café de la Nouvelle-Athenes, in Paris, France. In front of the woman sits a glass of the greenish colored liquid, Absinthe. It was first exhibited in 1872, where it was criticized as ugly and disgusting, and a later exhibition in 1892 it was removed from the show. It was shown a year later inn England, where it sparked controversy. The woman in the painting was derided as a whore and the entire image was seen as a blow to morality and the degradation of society due to absinthe.

My reimagined version has removed tables and bottles originally painted to the left of the two figures; and, puts the focus entirely on the absinthe drinker.

Painted in 1875–76, the work portrays a woman and man sitting side by side, the woman drinking a glass of absinthe. They appear lethargic and lonely. The man, wearing a hat, looks to the right off the edge of the canvas, while the woman, dressed more formally in fashionable dress and hat, stares vacantly downward. A glass filled with absinthe is on the table in front of her.

At its first showing in 1876, the picture was panned by critics, who called it ugly and disgusting. It was seen at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, but not again until it appeared at auction in 1892, when it was again treated with derision. The painting was shown again at the Grafton Gallery in England in 1893, this time entitled L’Absinthe, where it sparked even greater controversy. The people and the absinthe represented in the painting were considered by English critics to be shockingly degraded and uncouth.