La Clownesse au Moulin Rouge shows the female clown Cha-u-Kao arm in arm with the obese Gabrielle-la-Danseuse. Toulouse-Lautrec was fascinated by the ageing, white-wigged Cha-u-Kao who had made her name as a dancer and acrobat at the Moulin-Rouge and Nouveau Cirque around 1890. With her sad white face underlined by double chins and her plump body squeezed into grotesque theatrical attire, she was one of Lautrec's favourite models at this time.
Cha-u-Kao, whose name derives from the Chahut-Chaos dance, appears in eight works, amongst others in the well-known La Clownesse assise of the Elles series made in 1896.
The print is closely related to a work in peinture à l'essence on cardboard from about 1895, currently in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Winterthur.
La Clownesse au Moulin Rouge displays the artist at the pinnacle of his development of the spatter work technique which he used in his greatest works of the period to create the most subtle gradation of tone. The technique normally allowed only a small number of impressions to be pulled. This lithograph was produced in an edition of only twenty. Nine of these are recorded by Wittrock in public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York. As a result this print is now extremely rare.