Journal of Boredom
Studies (ISSN 2990-2525)
Issue 4, 2026, pp. 1–14
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19137214
https://www.boredomsociety.com/jbs
The Emotional Edgar
Degas:
Waiting, Boredom,
and Expectation in Degas’ L’Absinthe
Peter
Toohey
University of Calgary,
Canada
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0688-7031
How to cite
this paper: Toohey, P. (2026). The Emotional Edgar Degas: Waiting,
Boredom, and Expectation in Degas’ L’Absinthe. Journal
of Boredom Studies, 4. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17549849
Abstract: This article reinterprets Edgar
Degas’ L’Absinthe
(1875–1876) as a complex study of emotion rather than merely a work of social
critique. It argues that the painting foregrounds the interrelated experiences
of waiting, boredom, and frustrated expectation, central to Degas’ depiction of
modern life. Through comparison with Waiting (L’Attente)
(1880–1882) and other works, the
article highlights the importance of Degas’ ‘double-subject’ compositions, in
which paired figures generate temporal and emotional tension. Waiting is presented as an anticipatory state tied
to expectation, while boredom emerges when expectation is diminished or
deferred. In L’Absinthe, the female figure
embodies a condition in which expectation is not absent but blunted, producing
a more complex emotional state than the conventional ‘situational’ boredom seen
in works such as Manet’s La Prune. Degas thus offers a nuanced
representation of modern emotional life that anticipates later notions of
existential boredom.
Keywords: Degas,
L’Absinthe, boredom, waiting, expectation.
Two of the emotions that Degas often
depicts are boredom and waiting (I am serious about waiting as an emotion).
Degas’ boredom and waiting paintings are often linked with one another. This makes sense. Boredom is an emotion that
is often reliant for its substance on the experience of a waiting that is too
long or without timely relief. In addition, waiting may derive its emotional
status from its unvarying link to expectation and this too may be the case for
boredom. Expectation, doubtless an emotion too, is frequently linked or
associated with something desirable, though of course it can be linked to
something undesirable.[1] Usually, it’s one or the other of these, but
it’s not linked normally to something of small emotional significance. Why does
this matter? Part of the fascination of Degas’ painting resides not just in the
evocation of telling personal scenes from daily life, but also in his evocation
of significant emotions that are to be associated with daily life. Two of
these, I am going to try to show you, are waiting and boredom. A third, closely
linked with these two, is expectation. I will suggest that, in the case of
Degas’ painting, L’Absinthe, we are witnessing
waiting and boredom but also frustrated expectation.[2]
1. Waiting (1): The Absinthe
Drinker (1875–1876)
Edgar Degas (1834–1917), as far as I
know, has a small number of creations with the term ‘waiting’ in their title.
Those with which I am familiar are: Waiting for a Client (n.d.), a
drawing of prostitutes waiting for a client; Waiting (n.d., second
version), a drawing of prostitutes waiting for a client; Waiting (L’Attente) (1880–1882), the painting of a young ballerina and her
chaperone waiting to audition (we’ll look at this shortly); Waiting
(1874–1884), a monotype in brown ink of a prostitute; Waiting in the Wings
(n.d.), a painting of a group of ballerinas; and Waiting Ballerinas (1896),
a painting of a group of ballerinas readying to perform. But quite a number of
Degas’ other creations embrace this theme of waiting but without using the term
waiting at all in their titles.[3] Degas, unlike most artists, is a frequent
painter of waiting.
I’d like to focus on
one very famous image from Degas’ mid-career.[4] Its theme, I believe, is waiting, although it
does not have the term in its title. This is the famous L’Absinthe
(1875–1876). I’ll argue that, rather than acting simply as a commentary on
social predicaments, such as loneliness or alcoholism or the alienation of the
Parisian poor, L’Absinthe exemplifies Degas’
persistent interest in the slice-of-life and in the emotions, waiting,
especially that may go with it (Figure 1).[5]
Figure 1. Edgar
Degas, L’Absinthe/Dans un café/Au café,
1875–1876. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
WikiArt.com
The
tableau, of a gloomily inebriated young woman, the absinthe drinker, and her
serious faced, middle-aged pimp-like companion drinking something brown and
less potent, was posed for by Degas’ friends, the actress Ellen Andrée and the
painter, printmaker, and writer, Marcellin Desboutin.[6] It’s hard to tell what time of day it is in
their dreary looking café (La Nouvelle Athènes in
Place Pigalle, a venue popular with artists and intellectuals). There’s light
reflected in the mirror behind the pair of drinkers coming from elsewhere in
the room. Daylight? There are other people in the café. Marcellin Desboutin is watching something, probably someone off to
his left. Ellen Andrée is not watching anything much. The dangerous absinthe
appears to have dulled her completely. The painting is sometimes said to
represent social criticism of the alcoholism of the poor.[7] It’s occasionally said to echo visually the
social criticism of alcohol made by Emile Zola (1840–1902) in his novel, L’Assommoir (1877, apparently published as a serial
in 1876).[8] Zola was an acquaintance of Degas. Part of the
argument of Zola’s novel is to denounce the destruction of the poor caused by
alcoholism.[9] This could make the two characters in the
tableau, L’Absinthe, Zola’s Gervaise and
Copeau, the husband and wife brought low by alcohol in his novel.[10] The potent but popular drink absinthe is
mentioned in L’Assommoir.[11]
Can the young woman
in the double-subject L’Absinthe be
characterized as waiting, in the emotional sense of expectation, the one that I
have been using? People who are waiting are often depicted in pairs. This is
the case here, even if the male companion (and he is that—look at the closely
positioned glasses) is placed off-centre in the canvas and even if he is not
communicating with the young woman.[12] What is she waiting for? The next drink, you
could say. For someone (perhaps her companion) to speak to her? For something
interesting to happen? To go home from the dull looking café and get a sleep?
Or perhaps, at worst, she’s waiting for her pimp-like companion to put her back
to work? No doubt the potent absinthe has dimmed her capacity for expectation,
hence for waiting. It happens with drunkenness, I believe. But the expectation
is never completely dimmed, not unless you have passed out. I consider, however,
that if we were tempted to understand the young woman’s possible role as a
prostitute in company with her pimp (he looks more like a pimp than a companion
or husband), then the importance of waiting becomes clear. And there too
resides the social criticism, as I have indicated. But it’s this emotion of
waiting that offers the critical focus.
2. Waiting (2): Dega’s Waiting (1880–1882)
Compared to His L’Absinthe (1875–1876)
If what I’ve just said doesn’t
convince you of the importance of the emotion of waiting for the understanding
of Edgar Degas’ L’Absinthe, look with me at
the next image. This is Degas’ pastel, Waiting (L’Attente)
(1880–1882). It’s also a double-subject (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Edgar Degas, Waiting (L’Attente), 1880–1882. 48.2 x 61 cm. Norton Simon
Museum at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Pasadena, Los Angeles.
WikiArt.com
There’s an emotional story in Degas’ pastel,
entitled Waiting, and it concerns the experience of waiting. The
ballerina is waiting to go on stage to perform, or perhaps she is waiting for
an audition for a ballet corps or just waiting for a rehearsal. The chaperone,
seated on the very center of their stool, is waiting for the very same events.
Is she there just to protect the young dancer or is she waiting to egg her on?[13] In Waiting,
it’s the pairing that makes the picture unmistakably about waiting and about
the future and the past of the two players in this tableau. It’s the pairing
that hints at the story behind the picture. If either of the characters were
seated on their own, but in the same posture, you really wouldn’t know what was
going on. The chaperone, seated solo, might as well be angrily depressed or
impatient. The ballerina, seated on her own, might just be rubbing her sore
ankles and hoping for some relief from their pain.
How does Edgar
Degas’ pastel, Waiting, become such a
study in waiting? The chaperone, older but not too old, is the key. When Edgar
Degas pairs the two women he aims to highlight the future and the past for both
characters. When we look at the two women in the pastel it’s hard not to think,
“ah, the life of the chaperone – that’s what the young ballerina is really
waiting for!” She doesn’t know or feel that yet. Her innocence towards aging
and to the passing of time makes the chaperone’s victimhood all the more
evident. But one day the young woman will probably be a chaperone too, the
painting is saying, and she’ll be looking back at those sore ankles and wishing
that she could have them too. How long will she have to wait for this to
happen? In fifteen or twenty years maybe, if the young ballerina is unlucky,
she will be a chaperone too. That’s the waiting the pastel’s title refers to.
And the chaperone?
What is she waiting for now that she’s past her dancing prime? Perhaps this
will be the second-hand pleasure of the young woman’s success. Or perhaps it’s
just the end of her assignment with the young dancer. The pairing might also
offer another answer to this question and it’s one that relates to time. You
could almost say that the chaperone and the ballerina wait in different ways
and that this relates to their experience of time. Time must drag for the older
woman. Her dancing days are past. She’s not so old. But it’s all about the
triumphs of someone else now. That’s what the passing of time brings with it.
Time must race for the younger woman as she waits tensely and with arousal
waiting to perform. Her glory days are all to come, she must hope. She must be
nervous but at the same time excited. The comparison with the chaperone makes
this all the clearer.
Let’s return to L’Absinthe and try to see how the ideas behind the
pastel Waiting can help us better to understand L’Absinthe
as a painting about the emotion of waiting. But consider first the shared
structure and some of the shared phenotypical details prominent in both images.
There are two people sitting on a bench in front of a nondescript background in
both representations and in both one figure is moved to the centre—the absinthe
drinker and the chaperone.[14] The other figure is pushed to the edge of the
picture. The person in the centre assumes most of our attention. Feet are
unexpectedly prominent in both works. In both the feet of the younger person
are set toes outward. The older people in both wear black shoes. They also wear
black clothing while the younger people are in light clothing. The pairs in
both representations seem to ignore one another. There is a stark contrast in
age between the figures in both paintings. In L’Absinthe
the male figure is aged in his early fifties (Marcellin Desboutin,
the male model for the painting, was born in 1823). The young woman is aged
about twenty (Ellen Andrée, the female model for the painting, was born in
1857). The absinthe drinker is young enough to be the man’s daughter. In Waiting
the ballerina is about thirteen, while the chaperone looks to be in her early
thirties. Without the second person in Waiting and in L’Absinthe you’d be hard pressed to diagnose the
waiting.
And the ideas and
themes of the two representations? How do these relate to waiting? Age seems to
bring with it control, for better or worse. The chaperone is in charge of the
ballerina, at least socially, and the putative pimp runs the prostitute’s life.
In this sense age seems to coerce the expectation of youth. Age brings loss for
the chaperone and for the pimp. What are they waiting for? It is very hard to
imagine there are any triumphs left for the pair. Youth, in the case of the two
young people in these images, seems to be facing a future of loss, though it
should not be so. It is absinthe for the prostitute and a hint of failure for
the ballerina (she’ll be a chaperone too). Time seems to be important for both
the young and the old in both pictures. You’d say it races for the ballerina
(more anticipation than expectation), drags for the pimp, and, thanks to the
alcohol, almost ceases to exist for the absinthe drinker. So it is that
expectation as well as waiting that appears to be at the very heart of the
experience limned for each of these four characters. It seems to be left only
for the young ballerina to have something that looks with positive hope to the
future. How much is expectation left for her chaperone? Degas seems to imply
that there is not much. The putative pimp? Does he even care? The young woman
in his company? The look on her face seems to suggest that she has none, though
this might be as much the result of the absinthe as it could be the result of a
blighted life.
3. Édouard Manet’s Reaction to L’Absinthe (1875–1876): La Prune (Plum
Brandy) (1877), A Painting about Boredom
It has taken a long time to reach
this point. It’s here, in the company of the young absinthe drinker, where we
will find not just the emotions of waiting and expectation but also the link
with boredom. Look now at the next picture. It can tell us something
about Degas’ choices in L’Absinthe. La
Prune (Plum Brandy) (1877) is by Degas’ occasionally close friend
Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and it was completed about one year after L’Absinthe.[15] The model in the frame here is usually said to
be again Ellen Andrée, the young woman in L’Absinthe.[16] La Prune is sometimes said to have been
composed in response to L’Absinthe.[17] Manet appears to have seen boredom in Degas’ L’Absinthe, I’m going to suggest, and this is why he
offers in La Prune an image of the individual in the bored posture she
has adopted (Figure 3).
If you really want
to see a person in a traditional bored posture, then you have it in La Prune.[18] The boredom we’ll view here is of the simple
sort—an emotion of mild frustration produced by temporarily unavoidable and
predictable circumstances.[19] Here in Plum Brandy we have an
unalloyed phenotype or even a trope for boredom. But before I tell you how, let
me say that the young woman is left-handed. Why? Most smokers prefer to smoke
using their dominant hand. The woman’s cigarette is in her left hand. And most
drinkers prefer to hold their drink in their dominant hand—not just drinkers of
alcohol. The woman’s plum brandy stands near to her left hand. What does this
dexterity have to do with boredom? The posture in the painting is one that is
used often in visual representations of boredom. The head rests on the hand
with the elbow on the table. The dominant hand is usually left free to fiddle
with things.[20] So it is here, and the woman’s left hand, her
dominant hand, holds a cigarette and her drink is close to that left hand. Let’s
also look at her eyes. This sort of a phenotypical gaze is often called the
twelve-foot stare in the ten-foot room—the eyes stare off into the near
distance.[21] It’s also called the Artic
stare and it’s very common at work meetings when people become bored. You’ve
probably done this yourself. It’s a gaze that seems to go beyond the confines
of a room. It is often linked with boredom, and it is also often paired with
the head on the hand and the elbow on the table.[22]
Figure 3. Édouard
Manet, La Prune (Plum Brandy) c. 1877. Oil on canvas, 74 x 50 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington. WikiArt.com
Perhaps
what Manet is saying to his friend, Edgar Degas, is that he should have had the
absinthe drinker (the 20-year-old Ellen Andrée in both cases and, within the
paintings, a prostitute in both cases) look like this. She must be bored, after
all, if she is stuck in a dull café with a dull man. Could Manet also be saying
in La Prune that it would have been better to use the well-known tropes
for boredom, such as appear in his painting? If Manet is right to see boredom
in L’Absinthe, he appears to be saying that a
representation of boredom is best achieved using the traditional body posture
that is associated, often in art and often enough in real life, with boredom.
Degas, however, wanted to do it his own way and to show us a different form of
boredom. And so, he let the waiting situation do the talking for him and to
show us something new and different.
4. Boredom Again, Using the Same
Posture as Manet’s La Prune: Degas’ Woman Leaning on Her Elbow beside
a Vase of Flowers (1865)
Here is another reason why Degas
might not have wanted to adopt the traditional phenotypes relating to the bored
person in L’Absinthe. He’d already used them
to depict boredom twelve years before L’Absinthe.
This is in his 1865 painting Woman Leaning on her Elbow beside a Vase of
Flowers (sometimes called Woman with Chrysanthemums) reproduced
below (Figure 4). Of this well-to-do woman the Met (The Metropolitan Museum of
Art) catalogue suggests, on its website, she “is probably the wife of the
artist’s schoolboy friend Paul Valpinçon; Degas immensely enjoyed outings to
their country house, Ménil-Hubert, and the dahlias, asters, and gaillardias in
the bouquet would suggest a late summer visit”. Perhaps it might not have been
good form to attribute an emotion displayed by his middle-class friend, Madame Valpinçon to the absinthe drinker?
Figure 4. Edgar Degas, Woman
Leaning on an Elbow beside a Vase of Flowers (1865). Oil on canvas, 74 x 93
cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. WikiArt.com
In
L’Absinthe (1875–1876) and in Waiting
(1880–1882) Degas builds his pictures around a contrast between two
individuals, the so-called double-subject. In the former, it is between the
prostitute and the pimp. In the later it is between the ballerina and her
chaperone. In Woman Leaning on an Elbow beside a Vase of Flowers (1865)
there is a contrast between the huge, exuberant, and fertile vase of flowers
and Madame Valpinçon—the vase of flowers is larger
than the woman (which has led some to suggest Madame Valpinçon
was added as an afterthought to the painting) (Hofmann, 2007). But she is
bored.[23] Look at her posture.[24] It mirrors that of the prostitute in La
Prune (c. 1877). Her head leans against her left hand, while her arm rests
on the tabletop. And her gaze is elsewhere, in the Artic
manner. She’s carelessly abandoned her gloves, worn to protect her hands, by
the water jug. Lastly, we should emphasize that she is alone. Waiting seems to
come in pairs, in art and in life, while boredom tends to the solitary. Why is
Madame Valpinçon bored? I can’t tell you. Does it
have something to do with the large array of flowers, and a dull feeling that
no human can compete in beauty with these? One of my friends has suggested that
her posture (her phenotype) may indicate depression. The flowers work as a sort
of a memento mori. But I think it’s just boredom: despite all the
flowers, despite a life that enables her to gather them, she is still bored.
(Look at her mouth as well as her eyes). The theme of boredom is a frequent
subject in Degas’ art, but it is usually what is termed simple or situational
boredom.[25] Degas, I believe, was aiming to represent
something different with boredom in L’Absinthe
and it is based on frustrated expectation, in addition to waiting and boredom.
No need here, therefore for the typical bored posture that we’ve just seen in
Manet and with Madame Valpinçon.
5. Comparing the Three Women
If you look at the three figures
together, as I juxtapose them below (Figure 5), it’s perhaps simpler to see how
they resemble one another—but also how Degas in L’Absinthe
seems to have offered us a different way of looking at boredom by combining it
with waiting and with frustrated expectation.
The links between
Degas’ Woman Leaning on an Elbow beside a Vase of Flowers and Manet’s La
Prune are, I believe, apparent: the hats, the slight hunch of the
shoulders, being seated at a table, hold the three paintings together, but the
two women on the left both exhibit a leftward tilt of the heads, upcast eyes,
and heads leaning on the right hands with the elbow on the table. These two
paintings display what we’ve seen as the phenotypical tropes for simple
boredom. The absinth drinker on the other hand, has her arms, almost
despondently, by her side and her head tilted forward, and so too her gaze. The
gaze is downward directed and cuts absinthe drinker off from any others who
might be in La Nouvelle Athènes. There is the main
difference—and of course she is not seated alone, although we cannot see that
here.
Figure 5. Edgar Degas, Woman
Leaning on an Elbow beside a Vase of Flowers (detail, 1865); Édouard Manet,
La Prune (detail, c. 1877); Edgar Degas, L’Absinthe (detail, 1875–1876). The 20-year-old
Ellen Andrée, the model, appears in the paintings centre and right
There’s
enough resemblance between the absinthe drinker and the women of Woman
Leaning on an Elbow beside a Vase of Flowers and La Prune to be able
to link them, emotionally speaking, together. There is as well enough of the
bored posture in the absinthe drinker to be able guess that boredom of some
sort is at issue in L’Absinthe. But that’s not
the whole story. Her posture and gaze really are different. Can the young woman
in the L’Absinthe be characterized as waiting
or waiting as well as bored and perhaps even waiting without expectation?
Waiting first: people who are waiting are often depicted in pairs (and she has
a companion in this picture). What is she waiting for? I’ve already suggested
it could be for the next drink, for someone to speak to her, for something
interesting to happen, or to go home from La Nouvelle Athènes
and sleep. Or perhaps she’s waiting for her pimp to put her back to work.
Boredom second: the potent absinthe has dimmed and frustrated her capacity for
expectation. But you might say her very life has dimmed her expectations. Her
representation blends waiting with boredom and frustrated expectation.
Single emotions, if
they really exist as unitary entities, tend to blend with others, perhaps like
many illnesses. They are multivalent constructs and so it is in L’Absinthe. Krystal Marlier, who works on ancient
medicine and psychology, has explained this notion of multivalence more fully
to me in a personal communication:
Emotions are complex
multicomponent phenomena: evolutionarily automated programmes involving
hard-wired autonomic and motor systems, yet also culturally scripted,
linguistically framed, and cognitively appraised. While they have an
established biological seat, their expression is historically contingent and
varies with sociocultural conditions, political structures, religious
doctrines, and prevailing moral values.[26]
You can see just a
little of this in L’Absinthe, with its
multicomponent blend of waiting, frustrated expectation, and boredom. But not
so much so in Manet’s La Prune where what we view is mainly the
phenotypical trope for boredom. The same could be said for Degas’ Woman
Leaning on an Elbow beside a Vase of Flowers. Here trope and cliché tend to
get the better of things. There is no sense of frustrated expectation in these
two paintings. It more resembles Andreas Elpidorou’s anticipation.
6. Epilogue
I’ve suggested that the emotions of
waiting, and boredom, and frustrated expectation are especially important for
an understanding of Degas L’Absinthe.[27] Perhaps it is a measure of the strength and of
the fascination that abides in L’Absinthe that
it allows this range of understandings. I don’t believe that this is the case
for Degas’ earlier work, Waiting or Woman Leaning on an Elbow beside
a Vase of Flowers. Nor is this the case for Manet’s La Prune. And in
Degas’ Waiting the range of emotion is all there in its title. In Degas’
Woman Leaning on an Elbow beside a Vase of Flowers or Manet’s La
Prune the focus is on boredom and on expectation, but not of a frustrated
sort. There follows for Degas’ slice-of-life painting L’Absinthe
an unusual outcome. Is it possible that, because of this frustrated
expectation, Degas renders a vision of what is sometimes termed complex or
existential boredom? It is perhaps more popular in the century after Degas, but
the mal du siècle, to give it a French name, was entrenched in Paris in
the later second part of the 19th century. Elena Carrera (2023),
recently, is helpful on this matter.[28] She links Zola’s novel Nana (1880) and its protagonist, the
high-class prostitute Nana to this tradition. Nana also appears towards the end
of L’Assommoir (18761–877) whose connection to
L’Absinthe has already been mentioned. Nana,
of whom Manet offered a painting in 1877, began her life in poverty, as must
have done Degas’ absinthe drinker. Could it be that the artist’s model, Ellen
Andrée embodies an emotional state that resembles some of Nana’s emotional
world and embodies something as well that is closer to the literary versions of
existential boredom in the 20th century—a condition that resembles a
powerful feeling of emptiness and isolation in which a person may feel a
persistent interest in and difficulty with concentrating on their current
interests.[29] If that is the case then we might say once
again that Degas’ Woman Leaning on an Elbow beside a Vase of Flowers and
Manet’s La Prune focus is on what is ‘situational’ or ‘simple’ boredom.
Or maybe not. The
boredom linked with the mal du siècle is associated particularly with
the better off–or with bohemian intellectuals (compare Degas’ c. 1880–1884
painting, Portrait of Mary Cassat at National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC). Am I wrong to see an irritable boredom, a
version of mal du siècle, in the face and posture of the well-off
American impressionist artist, Mary Cassat? Her posture resembles the trio in
the previous section too. But there’s no waiting without expectation in this
painting. Does something as fashionable as mal du siècle ever penetrate
into the world of a person such as the absinthe drinker and her companion? Wouldn’t
such an intrusion require the free time and the money of a Nana or of her
aristocratic admirers? If that’s the case, and it is surely correct, then what
is the absinthe drinker experiencing? Bored, to be sure, but that combined in
equal measure with waiting without expectation? So, a complex boredom?[30] Or should we not worry about a nomination?
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Kate Toohey, for
pointing out to me the waiting in L’Absinthe.
My thanks as well to Josefa Ros Velasco for many years of help with boredom.
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