At the Moulin Rouge

What's on the canvas

A Table in a Smoky Hall

The canvas is unusually large for Toulouse-Lautrec — 123 by 141 centimetres, nearly square, when most of his cabaret scenes and posters stayed far smaller. At the centre sits a cabaret table with five people around it: Jane Avril's flame-orange hair fills the foreground, her back to us; beside her is the dancer La Macarona; the writer Édouard Dujardin, top hat and all, leans in to talk with the photographer Maurice Guibert, while another regular, the photographer Paul Sescau, sits a little apart. Nobody looks toward the viewer — every gaze drifts just past someone else, the way people look when they are in company and alone at the same time.

On the right, the frame seems to slice the scene off mid-thought: out of that dark edge rises a woman's face, lit from below in a sickly green-yellow glow from the gas footlights. Deeper in the room, by a mirror, La Goulue — the Moulin Rouge's most famous dancer, already a star of Lautrec's posters — fixes her hair. Further back still, almost lost among the top hats, walks the painter himself, barely over five feet tall, next to his cousin Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran, a doctor who stood a full head and a half above him.

Herringbone parquet, ochre-brown walls, black hats and coats — the whole scene sits in an almost monochrome key, against which only two patches of colour really register: Avril's red-orange hair and that green face in the corner, a cold hue recalling the absinthe glasses that turn up in other paintings of the period. The cropping looks accidental, as if someone had jogged the photographer's elbow — and that deliberate awkwardness holds the eye longer than a posed, centred scene would. In inches the canvas measures roughly 48 1/2 by 55 1/2, one of the largest formats Lautrec ever worked in; he usually kept to the size of a lithograph sheet or a small study.

How it was made

Three Years for One Night

Toulouse-Lautrec usually worked fast — a notebook sketch one evening, a lithograph the next week. At the Moulin Rouge took him nearly three years, from 1892 to 1895, an unusual stretch for him; by most accounts the canvas was set aside and reworked more than once before he considered it finished. Nobody commissioned it — he painted it for himself — and after his death in 1901 it passed to Maurice Joyant, his friend, the publisher of his lithograph albums and the executor of his estate.

Everyone at that table was a real regular at the Moulin Rouge, not a hired model: Jane Avril and La Goulue had already been posing for his posters, printed at Edward Ancourt's workshop, for several years, and the photographers Guibert and Sescau were personal friends who themselves photographed the cabaret and the painter. Lautrec sketched on the spot, on scraps of cardboard and in notebooks, then enlarged and reworked the composition later in the studio on the big canvas — his usual two-stage method, only stretched out over years this time.

Technical examination in the twentieth century found the canvas is made of two pieces: a main rectangle and an L-shaped strip glued along the right and bottom edges — exactly where the foreground woman's face sits. After the painter's death that strip was cut away, probably by a dealer who decided the acid-green face would put off buyers, and it was not rejoined until around 1914. For quick café sketches Lautrec usually thinned his oils almost to a wash on cardboard, a method known as peinture à l'essence, but for this finished canvas he went back to dense, conventional oil paint, layer on layer, which is exactly what let him keep repainting faces and poses over three years.

Where the imagery comes from

Posters, Snapshots, and Japanese Prints

By the time Lautrec started this canvas, he had already spent several years plastering Paris with Moulin Rouge posters — starting with La Goulue in 1891, printed at that same Ancourt workshop — and those prints did more than almost anything else to make the cabaret, opened in 1889 by the entrepreneurs Joseph Oller and Charles Zidler, famous well beyond Paris. More on the painter: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

The sharply cropped figures and the slightly overhead angle came from photography — still a new medium then, prone to catching people mid-gesture by accident — and from the Japanese ukiyo-e prints he collected, as many painters in his circle did; his apartment held sheets with similarly tight, flat-colour close-ups of faces. From his teacher Fernand Cormon, and from Edgar Degas, who haunted rehearsal rooms and backstage corridors just as Lautrec haunted cabarets, he picked up the habit of painting a caught moment rather than a posed one. Degas himself had already set that same cold, greenish café mood in his 1876 painting L'Absinthe, twenty years before Lautrec turned it into a face lit by a gas jet.

In those same years, a couple of hundred kilometres south, Van Gogh was chasing a related idea in his Starry Night — colour as a direct expression of feeling rather than a description of what was in front of him. They arrived from opposite directions: one hunting for whirl and flare in a small town's night sky, the other for it in the electric glare of a capital-city cabaret, but both were breaking with the calm, tasteful palette of salon painting in favour of something more unsettled.

The painting's fate

A Severed Face and a Widower's Gift

After Lautrec's death in 1901 the canvas, like most of his estate, passed through the hands of Maurice Joyant — already listed as its owner by 1902 — and then through the Galerie Manzi-Joyant. In 1926 it belonged to the Paris collector Jean Laroche, then to the dealer Paul Rosenberg, the same Paris dealer who later championed Picasso and Matisse, and in June 1928 the London gallery Reid & Lefevre acquired it.

That same year, 1928, it was bought by Frederic Clay Bartlett, himself a working painter — he had frescoed the ceiling of Chicago's Second Presbyterian Church — and a collector who three years earlier had lost his wife, Helen Birch Bartlett, to cancer. In her memory he had already given the Art Institute of Chicago, back in 1926, a collection of twenty-four paintings by Cézanne, Matisse, Seurat, and others — artists many American museums still considered too radical for their permanent galleries, a gift that predates the founding of New York's Museum of Modern Art. At the Moulin Rouge joined that memorial gift soon after, and Chicago audiences first saw it on December 23, 1930.

It has neither changed owners nor cities since: the painting remains part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it still hangs — unlike many European canvases of its era, it carries no history of Nazi-era confiscation or restitution disputes.

Cultural afterlife

The Poster on Picasso's Wall

The green-lit face belongs to the English dancer May Milton — Lautrec designed a separate advertising poster of her that same year, 1895, for an American tour that, in the end, never happened. That poster hung in the young Pablo Picasso's studio on the Boulevard de Clichy; you can see it on the wall in his own 1901 painting The Blue Room, meaning Picasso was, quite literally, painting underneath a Lautrec poster he looked at every day.

Critics often point to that acid-green face as an early hint of Expressionism, a jarring, almost feverish colour distortion arriving fifteen or twenty years before German painters made the technique part of their own program. The scene has had a long afterlife on screen, too: in 1952 John Huston shot Moulin Rouge, with José Ferrer playing the painter, deliberately grading the Technicolor to look like a Lautrec canvas, and in 2001 Baz Luhrmann's musical Moulin Rouge! gave the same role to John Leguizamo — more than a century on, the cabaret and its chronicler keep coming back to the screen together. The canvas itself rarely leaves Chicago: one of the few exceptions was 2011, when it travelled to London for a major exhibition at the Courtauld Institute devoted to exactly this period of Lautrec's career.