Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge
When the Moulin Rouge opened at the foot of Montmartre in 1889, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was there from the start, and he painted its dancers and singers for the next ten years.
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About the series
He lived and worked in Montmartre and spent most nights in its dance halls and cabarets, drawing as he watched. His subjects were people he knew by name: La Goulue, the star of the cancan, and her partner Valentin the Boneless; Jane Avril, thin and nervous, dancing on her own; the singer Yvette Guilbert in her long black gloves; the clown Cha-U-Kao in her yellow ruff.
His poster for the Moulin Rouge in 1891, with La Goulue kicking up her skirts in front of a crowd of black silhouettes, made his name almost overnight. In 1895 La Goulue, by then running her own fairground booth, asked him to paint two large panels for its front, one of them the Moorish Dance. They are now in the Musée d'Orsay. At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance, from 1890, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The colours are flat and the outlines strong, close to his posters. They work well in a bar, a dining room or anywhere with a bit of nightlife about it.
