Plum Brandy

Édouard Manet

Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Art

Plum Brandy (also known as La Prune) depicts a young woman seated alone at a marble-topped café table, her cheek resting pensively on one hand while the other holds an unlit cigarette; before her sits an untouched glass of plum soaked in brandy. Painted in oil on canvas around 1877, the work exemplifies Manet's characteristic style of loose, confident brushwork — applied in summary dabs of colour that coalesce into a vivid, psychologically charged image at a viewing distance. Manet was a central figure of French modernism whose commitment to depicting contemporary Parisian life challenged academic conventions, and this painting stands squarely within his sustained engagement with the social world of cafés and working women. The model is the actress Ellen Andrée, who appears in a similarly contemplative pose in Edgar Degas's L'Absinthe (1876), inviting art-historical comparison between the two works and their divergent tonal registers.