AMONG all Degas' many pictures of the Parisian scene,
Absinthe stands out by far. Two of the artist's friends
consented to pose for it: the engraver Marcellin Desboutin
and the actress Ellen Andrée. When it was first shown at the
Grafton Galleries in London in 1893, a cry of indignant protest
went up. What no one realized at the time was that Degas had
merely reverted to an old theme, one used time and again by
17th-century Dutch painters: an interior, with two people
drinking. Handling in his own way a device Vermeer was fond
of, he filled up the foreground of the canvas with rectangles
formed by the marble-topped tables; this served to thrust back
the two figures and create an impression of spatial depth.

A master of composition, Degas systematically devised one
unusual lay-out after another. Byzantine artists placed their
figures so that they looked out at the spectator, face on. This
in time became the standard type of composition for altarpieces
and frescos, with saints and martyrs symmetrically strung out
on either side of Christ or the Virgin. It is a stock lay-out with
Raphael, indeed in countless 16th- and 17th-century pictures.
Of all the Old Masters only Tintoretto is an exception to the
rule, and many of his works reveal an interest in composing
quite comparable to Degas': carefully spaced out objects receding
sidewise, perspective lines that carry the eye far into the back-
ground, genuinely three-dimensional composition that staggers
figures well out in depth.

The old perpendicular lay-out, hinging on a central axis, is
common to all 19th-century painters. Delacroix is one of the
very few to have occasionally laid out a picture in terms of
slanting lines. Courbet and Manet invariably use an axial form

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