Anon [J. S. Spender]
Westminster Gazette
17 February 1893

“…the two works of Degas exhibited in this gallery bring so forcibly before us the artistic ideals of the “new painters” that we really cannot forbear. One is called “Absinthe”… A man and a woman, both of the most degraded type, are seated on a bench in a wine-shop, their backs reflected in a glass screen behind them … the total effect … is one which most of us will be anxious to banish from our minds as quickly as possible, and neither of them tells us anything about M. Degas’ skill which we did not know about before.

D.S.M. [D.S. MacColl]
Spectator
25 February 1893

L’Absinthe, by Degas, is the inexhaustible picture, the one that draws you back, and back again. It set a standard by which too many of the would-be “decorative” inventions in the exhibition are cruelly judged. It is what they call “ a repulsive subject”, two rather sodden people drinking in a café… so does this master of character, of form, of colour, watch till the café table-tops and the mirror and the water-bottle and the drinks and the features yield up to him their mysterious affecting note. The subject, if you like, was repulsive as you would have seen it, before Degas made it his. If it appears so still, you may make up your mind that the confusion and affliction from which you suffer are incurable.”

G.M. [George Moore]
Speaker
25 February 1893

We knew Degas to be a man of consummate genius…in the Degas we have execution equal to, though wholly different from Whistler; and we have a reading of character beside…Look at the old Bohemian- the engraver, Deboutin [sic]… The woman that sits beside the artist was at the Elysée Monmartre until two in the morning, then she went to the ratmort and had a soupe aux choux; she lives in the Rue Fontaine, or perhaps the Rue Breda; she did not get up until half-past eleven; then she tied a few soiled petticoats round her, slipped on that peignor, thrust her feet into those loose morning shoes, and came down to the café to have an absinthe before breakfast. Heavens! – what a slut! A life of idleness and low vice is upon her face; we read there her whole life. The tale is not a pleasant one, but it is a lesson. Hogarth’s view was larger, wider, but not so incisve, so deep, or so intense. Then how loose and general Hogarth’s composition would seem compared to this marvellous epitome…That open space in front of the table into which the skirt and the lean legs of the man come so well. How well the point of view was selected! The beautiful, dissonant rhythm of that composition is like a page of Wagner.

A Philistine Remonstrance
Westminster Gazette
9 March 1893

Critics have in times past talked a great deal of rhapsodical nonsense about pictures that in spite of it all remain classic and beautiful; but is there anything in the whole literature of the subject quite to touch this about the “mysterious affecting note” of table-tops, mirrors, water-bottles, and drinks? … the “new critics” are in possession of the most of the weekly and several of the daily papers, and with one accord they tell us the same thing. These two sodden people are their ideal … when a new critic comes forward to set up a new standard … we are entitled to ask for his credentials. “Academic” is, in D.S.M.’s vocabulary, a term of derision … the subject is nothing; the use of paint, the handling, everything … If it is the object of the painter to cut capers upon paper or upon canvas…why, then the two sodden people at the café may easily be “ the standard”, for Degas’s performances are astonishingly clever. If you have been brought up in another way, and have been taught to think that a dignity of subject and the endeavour to portray a thing of beauty are of the essence of art, you will never be induced to consider “l’Absinthe” a work of art, however “incurable” your “affliction and confusion” … This is not a quarrel between one method and another- between impressionism and realism ... It touches the whole question of artistic ideals, and in that matter, at all events, not even the humblest of use need entrust his conscience to a group of critics, however assertive and unanimous they may be…

Westminster Gazette
11 March 1893

…D.S.M. assumes that because I object to L’Absinthe being paraded as a ‘standard’ of art, therefore I find Degas uninteresting. Not at all. I paid my little tribute to ‘the verve of the performance.’ I admitted its humanity. I don’t object when D.S.M. calls it a ‘lesson’… I only object when D.S.M. sets up these ‘two rather sodden people’ as a standard of art, and asserts that they are not ‘repulsive’. Here, I think, D.S.M. lets his admiration for the ‘handling’ confuse him. Fine painting it may be, but ‘fine art’ is a very different thing. When a work like this is set up as a standard of beauty, I think I discern the cause of the vulgarities and flippancies which are spoiling so many young painters.

W.P.H. ‘The New Art Criticism’
Westminster Gazette
13 March 1893

…no artist can represent exactly what he sees. He is prevented by his material … be sure that his pictures will never fetch high prices. The painter has, however, a meaning, and we are grateful to a critic who is in his confidence, and can explain him to our ignorance. The artist can probably tell us something we did not know before if we are given the clue to his language… It is not forbidden to art to excite other passions than admiration. Pathos and horror are no more beyond he limits of plastic than of any other art … many men like tragedy, and it is clearly permissible to paint it.
That the defenders of the unusual, such as D.S.M. … should claim for it greater virtues than it possesses is not surprising. A discoverer always thinks too much of his novelty.

W. B. Richmond
Westminster Gazette
16 March 1893

The English Impressionists ridicule subject and ‘literary art.’At the same time Mons. Degas is their god. Now L’Absinthe is a literary performance. It is not a painting at all. It is a novelette – treatise against drink. Everything valuable about it could have been done, and has been done, by Zola. Hogarth preached sermons likewise but he painted them; and quite apart from their subjects, or rather in spite of them, Hogarth’s pictures are great works of painting, interesting and complete in every sense. It would be ridiculous not to recognise M. Degas as a very clever man, but curiously enough his cleverness is literary far more than pictorial. This is the reason, I suspect, why a certain set of writers have taken him up; they confuse his painting and his story-telling powers.

D.S.M.
Spectator
18 March, 1893

Is it, or is it not, a toss-up, when a Ruskinian stands before a picture like L’Absinthe, what view his sentiment will impel him to take of it? In one mood, no doubt, he will sternly lay it down that the most stammering and imperfect attempt to portray the Heavenly Host would be more worthy and noble than any skilful delineation of boors carousing. But cannot one almost imagine him turning on his too faithful disciple as he regards Degas with so shocked and disapproving eye, and lecturing him thus: ’There is no more pitiful symptom of diseased modern vanity than for a man who has learned neither to see nor to draw, to think that he can cover the idleness of his imagination, and the impotence of his hand, by the exalted nature of his subject. Nothing, forsooth, will serve him but angels whom he has never seen, and is not likely to see! Let him rather, with what of faithful vision and stern veracity is in him, picture some corner of this God’s earth, some table-top, water-bottle, or the like! Let him leave the angels to those who have seen them, and paint his brother ‘boozing’ at the Blue Lion. So it may be given him in time to behold also the Heavenly Host’. The one sentiment is just as good, just as misplaced, as the other; and all the time the picture has not been seen at all