Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Plum Brandy
Edouard Manet French
Not on view
Following Degas’s In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker), on view nearby, Manet evoked the same setting of the Nouvelle-Athènes and selected the same model, the actress Ellen Andrée, for his own café scene. Although centered on a woman alone with her drink, which in popular imagery of the time often implied moral indecency, her identity is ambiguous. Resting her head in hand, as she ignores her brandy-soaked plum and unlit cigarette, she gazes wistfully into the distance, conveying a sense of urban isolation similar to that evoked in Degas’s painting.
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