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The Absinthe Drinker (French: Le Buveur d'absinthe) is an early painting by Édouard Manet, c.1859, considered to be his first major painting and first original work.

Manet became a student in the studio of Thomas Couture from 1850, but grew to dislike his master's Salon style and set up his own studio in 1856. Little of Manet's earliest work survives, and much may have been destroyed by Manet himself.

The Absinthe Drinker is a full-length portrait of an alcoholic rag-picker named Collardet who frequented the area around the Louvre in Paris, painted in mostly brown, grey and black tones. The subject stands wearing a black top hat and wrapped in a brown cloak, like an aristocrat, leaning on a ledge, with the empty bottle discarded on the floor by his feet. Manet later added a half-full glass of absinthe on the ledge. Influenced by the realism of Gustave Courbet, the work shows a mundane subject on a large scale,. Manet may have taken inspiration from the poem Le Vin de chiffonniers ("The rag-picker's wine") in Charles Baudelaire's 1857 collection Les Fleurs du mal, and also from the paintings of ordinary people by Diego Velázquez, particularly his paintings of Aesop[1] and Menippus, and Watteau's L'Indifférent.