Manet's model was the actress Ellen Andree, who also sat for Degas around the same period; Degas painted her in his own café subject, In a Cafe, also known as The Absinthe Drinker, made outside La Nouvelle Athenes in 1876 alongside the engraver Marcellin Desboutin^[1]. In The Plum, Andree appears alone, an unlit cigarette in her hand, seated before the plum steeped in brandy that gives the painting its title, absorbed in her own thoughts rather than posed for the viewer's benefit. Friends of Manet recorded that although the finished picture reads as an observed cafe scene, he actually painted it in his studio, where he kept a small marble-topped table for precisely this kind of composition, working from the model there rather than at La Nouvelle Athenes itself^[1].

By the mid-1870s Manet's regular meeting place had shifted from the Cafe Guerbois, on what is now the avenue de Clichy, to La Nouvelle Athenes on the place Pigalle, a change prompted partly by the Franco-Prussian War, which scattered the earlier group: Frederic Bazille had been killed in the fighting, and other regulars had moved out of central Paris^[1]. The Plum belongs to a body of work contemporaries described as Manet's naturalist series, paintings that depicted the same social and artistic milieu, café society, models, actresses and writers, that Emile Zola and the Goncourt brothers were exploring in their own naturalist fiction during the same years^[1].

The Cafe Guerbois, where Manet's circle had gathered before the war, became known locally as the Artists' Corner and to critics as the École des Batignolles, a name that stuck to the loose group of painters and writers who met there^[2]. Claude Monet later recalled that it was Manet who first invited him to the Batignolles cafe, where he met Fantin-Latour, Cezanne, Degas, the critic Edmond Duranty and a young Zola, describing the evenings as fascinating, argumentative gatherings that toughened everyone's resolve and sharpened their thinking^[3]. Manet was remembered by contemporaries as the dominant, often cutting presence in these debates, matched in wit chiefly by Degas, whose knowledge one contemporary called impeccable^[1].