Besides the thrill of seeing the artworks themselves, a secondary delight of big gallery shows such as the ones which have just opened in Glasgow and Edinburgh is the rich stories around them. I visited both exhibitions last week and found the tales as engrossing as the art.

In Glasgow, The Burrell Collection is currently hosting Discovering Degas, a large solo survey of the work of French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. It’s over 50 years since there has been anything comparable in Scotland. Among the very many paintings on loan is one from the venerable Musée d’Orsay, a gargantuan Beaux-Arts building on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris. Do visit if you’re ever in the City Of Light.

The museum’s contribution is an 1875 oil painting originally titled Au Café, then re-christened L’Absinthe, and presented in Glasgow as In A Café (L’Absinthe).

The canvas shows a disconsolate-looking couple in a Parisian café, she with a glass of absinthe in front of her, he with a rum and cold coffee concoction known as mazagran and used mostly as a hangover cure (or cheveux du chien, as they probably don’t say in France).

The venue is the Café de la Nouvelle Athenes in Montmartre’s Place Pigalle, a regular meeting place for Degas and fellow painters Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh. It was also frequented by Erik Satie (who doubled as house pianist) and a 15-year-old aspiring composer named Maurice Ravel, and later became a striptease club much favoured by the occupying........

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