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1. "Since the middle ages monks had a reputation for indulgence. In Protestant England they were an especially common target for satire, representing everything that was deemed to be corrupt within the Catholic church" (Source: Tate). These monks are merrymakers in a very festive mode. They drink a lot and are very probably drunk. Unexpectedly, a woman is also seated around the table. She is laughing and giving one of the monks a promising look.

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2. Outside a pub, a drunk man hesitates between going home to his wife or staying to drink again with his friends.

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4. Five Points was a slum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Declared in 1858 in the New York Herald a “nest of drunkenness, roguery, debauchery, vice, and pestilence,” the neighborhood was home to a combustible mix of New York’s poorest citizens: recently arrived (predominantly Irish) immigrants, unskilled laborers, and African Americans. Highlighting the district’s renowned chaos and vulgarity, the figures in the painting fight, flirt, and generally misbehave amid dilapidated buildings. Although the artist has not been identified, this image is well known, having been reproduced as a lithograph in a 1855 guide to New York City (Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)".

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7. "After a Long Cruise, a comic view of daily life on a dock, displays the bawdy humor popular at mid-century. Three drunken sailors wreak havoc by accosting a well-dressed black woman and knocking over a fruit-and-nut vendor’s stand" (Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

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9. Alcohol is represented by Daumier as an escape offered to the poor. 

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10. Alcohol, including wine, was often represented as a plague ravaging society. The nineteenth-century artist Mihaly von Zichy presents the evils of drink in his painting Falstaff with Jug of Wine and Pipe. This sympathetic Shakespearian character (1597) is a confirmed alcoholic. Sack (xeres) is his chosen poison: “If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.”  (Henry IV, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 3). Falstaff’s choice of words shows the pride he takes in his addiction.

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11. In the daring Dans un Café, Edgar Degas shows us the widespread problem of alcoholism. The painting shows a man and a woman sitting in a bar. The woman seems mournful; her clothes are worn and her expression sad. She has the slouching shoulders and pale face of an absinthe-drinker. The man looks away from her, his own face ravaged by wine... He is drinking coffee considered as a remedy! The extreme solitude of the characters strikes the viewer. Exhibited for the first time in London in 1876, Degas’ painting caused a scandal among the Victorian public. Despite this, the bar scene – which dates back to seventeenth-century Dutch painting – was nothing new. It was, rather, Degas’ realism that shocked. The artist’s penetrating, critical eye condemns contemporary society. The painting has a connection with Zola’s novel L’Assommoir; the author himself wrote to Degas to confirm that “I have described in great detail, on more than one of my pages, certain of your paintings”. This realistic ‘slice of life’ may have also influenced Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec.

 

12. Manet uses a broader perspective in Interior of a Café, Place du Théâtre Français. The only customer is a woman, probably an alcoholic, gazing into the middle distance. The bar has only just opened, but already she is feeding her dependence. 

 

14. At the end of the 19th century, helped by the abundance of cheap wine, alcoholism caused great problems for the poorest in society, in Belgium as in France. From the very start of his painting career, Eugène Laermans demonstrated a realism that was both social and humanitarian; his compositions frequently focused on workers and peasants. Here, he illustrates alcoholism, which was a theme also treated by other Belgian painters of the period (such as Henry de Groux and James Ensor). The first victims of this drunkard are his wife and children (as in Greuze’s Drunken Cobbler). The scene takes place in winter, and the family is shown in the foreground. Behind them, on the other bank of the river, we can see smoking factory chimneys. The drunkard, almost unconscious, walks mechanically, supported by his wife. She is thin, her eyes tired and resignation visible in her expression; the couple’s young daughter, her face older than her years, watches the terrible display. This addiction, this “second nature”, evokes Aesop’s fable of The woman and the drunkard.*

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17. During his stay at the Saint Rémy Asylum, near Arles, Vincent Van Gogh copied works by his favorite artists. This included an engraving by Honoré Daumier, Physiology of the Drinker: The Four Ages. Van Gogh’s copy is entitled Drinkers, which partly hides the allegorical intention of the original work. The oldest protagonist (in the middle) gulps his wine, while the middle-aged man drinks beer. The young man (on the right) postures while downing his glass of absinthe. The etching demonstrates a famous Dutch proverb that Van Gogh, who was Dutch too, would have recognized: ‘as the old sing, so the young pipe’, already illustrated by Jan Steen (see gallery: Celebrations and Social Life) . The young boy greedily drinks a glass of milk. An addiction for every age!

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18. The Drinker, a youthful work by Toulouse-Lautrec, rings strikingly true. Already an alcoholic and proud of it (“I’ll drink milk the day cows graze in the vineyard”), the artist paints what he knows.

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19. Suzanne Valadon was the mistress and model of Toulouse-Lautrec, who gave her painting lessons. She was the model for The Hang-over, a portrait of an isolated working-class woman crushed by alcohol. Valadon would become the first female painter to be admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-arts.

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20. This painting’s title comes from the former French slang expression “un miché à la mie” (literally, a “crumbly roll”), which referred to clients of prostitutes who neglected to pay for their services.

 

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* There was a woman whose husband was always drunk, so she came up with a plan to cure him of his drinking problem. After he had passed out one night and was sleeping the sleep of the dead, she picked him up and carried him on her shoulders to the common cemetery. Then she put him down on the ground and left him there. She waited until he had time to sober up, then she went and knocked at the entrance to the cemetery. Her husband shouted, 'Who's there?' She answered, 'I am the one who brings food to the dead.' Her husband shouted back, 'I don't want anything to eat, but bring me something to drink, my good man! It pains me to hear you speaking of food but saying nothing about a drink!' The woman then beat her breast and exclaimed, 'Woe is me! My ingenuity has not accomplished anything! O my husband, you have not simply failed to learn your lesson: you are actually even worse than before. Your problem has turned out to be permanent!' This fable shows that people should not regularly engage in bad behavior because at a certain point the habit will impose itself permanently, even if they do not want that to happen. (Aesop's Fables, translated by Laura Gibbs 2002, The Woman and her Drunken Husband)