From the November 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. Edgar Degas’s In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) of 1875–76 depicts the actress Ellen Andrée sitting impassively, the pictorial space severed by levitating grey tables, while a man dressed in black sits beside her like a chaperone from the underworld. Her eyelids are slabs of heavy flesh, drooping into nothingness
Source