In the Café: The Guest and the Anaemic Cashier

Lautrec has taken up the subject of Degas’s Absinthe and used it to express the hopeless loneliness and alienation of the two people portrayed. In both paintings a couple sit in front of a wall mirror, behind a table, and the bottle and glasses stand as a barrier between viewer and figures. Lautrec, however, directs the viewer’s attention to the painful differences between the well-fed bourgeois and the pale, undernourished employee, who is pointedly turning away from her neighbour.