Plum Brandy by Édouard Manet

A woman in a pink dress rests her cheek against one hand. The other lies on a marble café table, holding a cigarette beside a small glass of fruit and amber liquid. Her eyes turn away from both objects, towards something beyond the picture. Manet gives us a close view of her appearance while leaving the occasion open.

Painted about 1877, Plum Brandy, also known as The Plum, belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.^[1] Its stillness depends on a carefully organised arrangement of hands, fabric, furniture and colour. The woman seems within conversational distance, yet the broad tabletop and her averted attention keep our relationship with her uncertain.

A Face Turned Beyond the Table

The woman leans forward, with her right elbow on the table and the back of her hand supporting her cheek. The wrist bends sharply beneath the face. Her fingers curl inward, creating a small cluster of shapes between the head and the ruffled cuff.

The pose brings the face close to us. One cheek presses into the hand, and the head tilts slightly while the eyes look towards our right. The mouth is closed. There is enough expression to suggest a passing state of attention, but no clear event to explain it.

Her gaze is particularly important because the rest of the figure is so available to inspection. We can examine her hat, cuffs, hands and the glass in front of her, while she attends to something outside the canvas. The picture allows a close encounter without making eye contact its centre.

The raised arm also gives the body its main structure. Its pale forearm rises almost vertically from the table, then turns through the hand towards the cheek. The opposite arm slopes across the right side, ending in the hand with the cigarette. These two directions bring the figure forward and spread her presence across the narrow canvas.

Below the marble, part of the pink dress remains visible. Buttons and folds continue the body beyond the horizontal interruption of the table. We see enough to understand how she sits, though the chair and lower legs are largely withheld.

The Plum, the Glass and the Cigarette

The glass is small, short-stemmed and placed near the middle of the table. A plum rises within its bowl, above an amber liquid that gives the painting its familiar English title. Theodore Reff connects the subject with the Parisian café practice of serving plums preserved in brandy.^[2]

Manet builds this little object from conspicuous touches of colour. Brown and green marks establish the fruit; golden passages suggest the liquid; pale strokes pick out the rim and the foot. Blue-grey touches in the stem help distinguish transparent glass from the warm contents above.

The object is recognisable at a glance, but close looking reveals how little of it has been smoothly described. A few light and dark marks stand for curved glass, reflected surroundings and the fruit’s uneven surface. The bowl has a delicacy that contrasts with the larger forms of hand, sleeve and table.

The cigarette is similarly economical. It appears as a short white shape among the fingers of the woman’s left hand, where pink, pale grey and red strokes distinguish the knuckles and joints. The hand lies low against the marble, its fingers projecting towards us. Their foreshortening gives an ordinary resting gesture a substantial physical presence.

The cigarette appears unlit, and the glass stands before her without being lifted. Both details contribute to a sense of pause. They establish what is available to the woman at this moment, while leaving us unable to say how long she has sat here or what will happen next.

Pink Dress, Pale Trimming and Red Upholstery

The dress is a broad field of pale pink, varied by lilac shadows, warmer touches and almost white highlights. The sleeves have enough volume to make the arms seem comfortably enclosed. Ruffles gather around the cuffs, introducing small irregular edges into the larger curves of the shoulders and elbows.

At the neck, pale blue and white fabric falls in a loose bow. Its light marks are cooler than much of the dress and less continuous than the smooth area of the forearm. Their broken edges allow the bow to look airy even where the paint itself is quite visible.

The hat introduces the strongest dark outline near the face. Its black brim follows a long curve above the forehead, while pale trimming spreads across the crown in layered strokes. Blond hair appears below. The contrast between dark rim, light ornament and warm hair makes the head easy to find among the surrounding patterns.

Behind the woman, the red banquette forms a darker setting for the pink clothing. Its patterned upholstery is described with short, loose marks. The two reds are close enough to connect the figure with the furniture, but different enough to keep the sleeves and shoulders distinct.

Warm gold and ochre areas occupy the upper background. They frame a blue-green ornamental panel behind the head, giving the pale complexion and pink dress another set of colour relationships. The face sits between the cool decoration and the warmth of the hat’s surrounding woodwork.

Marble and the Frame Around Her Head

The table stretches across nearly the entire width. Its light surface has grey and greenish veins, painted in broad, irregular strokes. It separates the woman’s upper body from her lap and places a considerable area between her and us.

At the same time, it supports the gestures that bring her close: the elbow beneath the face, the resting hand and the little glass. The tabletop acts as both a boundary and a shared surface. We look across it as we might from a neighbouring seat, but the painting supplies no companion within the scene.

Manet’s signature lies near the front left edge, as though written on the marble itself.^[1] Its position ties the name to an object within the painting. The table becomes especially noticeable when we find that small inscription among its pale veins and darker strokes.

The background provides firmer divisions. The top of the banquette runs horizontally behind the figure, while the warm wooden framing introduces verticals around the decorative panel. The head occupies a smaller rectangle within the larger picture.

Against this fairly strict arrangement, the hat trimming, bowed neck fabric and curled fingers seem more irregular and mobile. The furniture holds the scene steady while the figure introduces bends, soft edges and changes of direction.

Ellen Andrée and the Café Figure

Reff identifies the model as Ellen Andrée, the actress and artists’ model who also posed for Degas’s L’Absinthe. He makes the connection through comparisons with her appearances in other works.^[2] This gives a name to the woman who posed, while leaving the character of Manet’s café customer open to interpretation.

Reff reads the represented figure as a prostitute waiting in a café.^[2] That is an interpretation of the painting’s social setting. The pink dress, cigarette and seated pose do not provide a private biography of Andrée, nor do they establish the woman’s precise occupation or reason for being there.

A model can lend a painting a recognisable face while taking a role devised for the image. Here the costume, furniture and position of the arms combine to make that role visible. The result can look like a casual encounter even though the appearance has been carefully arranged.

The distinction also makes the face more interesting to study. Its expression need not be reduced to a single emotion that explains everything else. We can notice the weight of the cheek against the hand, the slightly tilted head and the eyes directed beyond the frame without deciding that they disclose loneliness, intoxication or a particular expectation.

A Café Interior Recreated for Painting

The picture has often been associated with the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes. Reff connects it with that establishment but observes that Manet’s decorative background differs from other painted views of the café.^[2] The setting serves the composition with unusual precision, especially in the rectangular enclosure around the head.

Juliet Wilson-Bareau suggests that Manet combined studio furniture with records of actual café interiors when constructing the scene.^[3] Her account helps explain how a recognisable kind of public place could be brought under the painter’s control. It remains a reconstruction of his method, rather than a record of a particular sitting at a known table.

What we see is enough to establish the café situation: upholstered seating, a marble surface, a served drink and a customer dressed to appear in public. The exact address is less necessary to the picture’s effect than the close relationship between those elements.

The ornamental panel offers a good example. Its patterned surface frames the head without supplying a clearly readable view into another room. Along with the woodwork and banquette, it limits the apparent depth. The woman is brought forward, where her face and hands carry the encounter.

What Manet Changed

The painting’s apparent ease was achieved through revision. Wilson-Bareau reports that the drink was originally a tall glass of beer. In her account of the unpublished X-radiograph, a glass rises almost to shoulder height on the right, and the area around the cigarette-holding hand has been extensively altered.^[3]

She also suggests that the woman may earlier have held a cigarette near her cheek with the other hand. Separately, she reports that infrared reflectography revealed two alterations to the decorative framing behind the head.^[3]

These findings make the small glass worth another look. The final stemmed vessel keeps the drink low on the table, leaving the face and bent arm more open. A much taller glass would have occupied a larger part of the space beside the figure. The change affects the arrangement of the picture as well as the subject named by its title.

The revisions to the framing point towards a similar concern with placement. The panel and its warm surround now make a compact setting for the hat and face. Their apparent rightness belongs to a process in which Manet reconsidered the relationships between figure, gesture and background.

Comparing Manet with Degas’s L’Absinthe

Degas’s Dans un café, also called L’Absinthe, dates from 1875–76 and belongs to the Musée d’Orsay. The museum identifies its sitters as Ellen Andrée and the painter and printmaker Marcellin Desboutin, and explains that the scene was made in the studio.^[4]

The shared model makes the comparison especially revealing. In Degas’s painting, the woman sits beside a dark-clothed man. Both occupy the upper right of the composition, behind a succession of sharply angled tables. A broad mirror fills much of the wall behind them.

Manet comes much closer to his single figure. His marble tabletop lies broadly across the picture, and the raised forearm gives a direct route towards the face. Degas’s tables lead the eye through a more complicated sequence of planes before it reaches the seated people.

Their palettes also create different experiences. Degas uses restrained greys, browns and pale yellowish tones around his figures. Manet gives pink, red and gold a much larger presence. His dark hat and blue-green panel sharpen those warmer colours, bringing attention to the costume as well as the pose.

Reff regards the Degas painting as an influence on Manet’s.^[2] The comparison supports that connection without making the works interchangeable. The sitter’s placement, the amount of surrounding space and the direction of the tables each change how we approach the figure.

For a fuller account of the earlier picture, see Degas’s L’Absinthe. In both paintings, named models helped create a convincing café scene. Their appearances within those scenes can be studied without treating the depicted drink as evidence of their private habits.

Exhibition and Collection History

Plum Brandy appeared in Manet’s exhibition at the gallery of La Vie Moderne in 1880. The National Gallery records it as number four in that show.^[1] This placed the café figure among works Manet presented through a contemporary cultural venue, rather than the official Salon.

The painting passed from the artist to Charles Deudon about 1881. Its later owners included Arthur Sachs, before Paul Mellon bought it through Knoedler in 1961. It was given to the National Gallery of Art in 1971.^[1]