Édouard Manet
(1832 - 1883)
Plum Brandy, also known as The Plum (French: La Prune), is an oil painting by Édouard Manet. It is undated but thought to have been painted about 1877.
Manet may have based the painting on observations at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes on the Place Pigalle in Paris. However, the background - the decorative grille and its gold frame - does not match other depictions of the café, and suggests the painting was made in Manet’s studio, where he is known to have had a café-style marble table on iron legs. Manet uses a simple style: for example, the plum in its glass and the fingers of the woman's left hand are created with just a few dabs of colour.
The model is the actress Ellen Andrée, who was also depicted with Marcellin Desboutin in the similar 1876 painting L'Absinthe (or In a Café) by Edgar Degas. The similarities between the two paintings suggest that Manet's The Plum may be a response to Degas's L'Absinthe. Degas's painting shows a bleak scene of despair blunted by absinthe; Manet's is a more hopeful scene, where there is the chance that the sitter's loneliness may be broken. Andrée also appears in Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1881 painting Luncheon of the Boating Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet_Painting_in_his_Studio
Plum Brandy
c. 1877
Oil on canvas
73 x 50 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
https://www.nga.gov/artworks/53034-plum-brandy
In a Café or L'Absinthe, 1876, Degas


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