# The Absinth Drinkers [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [RAFFAËLLI, Jean-François]() - Date: 1851-1900 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 110 x 110 cm ## Commentary Raffaëlli was a painter of suburban scenes which were sometimes pessimistic and sometimes rather tender. Essentially self-taught, he essayed various thematic areas, and alternated between the Salon and other exhibition strategies. His contact with the Impressionists was merely loose, and consisted partly in a shared interest in social fringe groups. At first he painted Breton peasants, the urban alcoholics and rag-and-bone collectors. He also shared the Impressionists' concern with the persuasive atmospherics of sketchy pictorial spatial contexts. The Absinth Drinkers, a semi-lifesize canvas exhibited in 1881 as The Down and Outs, would have appealed to Degas for the canvas structure and the subject of the lonely outsiders, but also the delicately nuanced colouring. ## Related artworks - [Carrefour Drouot]() - [Fisherman on the Bank of Seine]() - [Houses on the Banks of the Oise]() - [Man with Two Loaves of Breads]() - [The Autumn of the Life]() - [The Banks of the Seine Near Paris]() - [Waiting Wedding Guests]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()