.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Toulouse-Lautrec, like many of his contemporaries, became increasingly involved in the avant-garde theatre of Paris. Perhaps the most celebrated of the directors was Andr Antoine (1858-1943), founder of the Thtre-Libre near the Place Pigalle. Antoine was keen to involve artists in the design of programmes, posters and scenery with the aim of creating 'total theatre'. This co-operation between artists and theatre directors quickly became la mode (Munch, for example, designed a programme for Ibsen's Peter Gynt in 1896).
It is recorded that Lautrec exhibited three works at the fifth Exposition des Peintres Impressionistes et Symbolistes at the Galerie Le Barc de Boutteville located at 47 rue le Peletier in the summer of 1893 where Vuillard, Gauguin, Denis and Bonnard were all regular exhibitors. Among the works by Lautrec shown in 1893 was an oil entitled Jacqueline (P.674), a poster, and what is described as the Programme pour le Thtre-Libre. The last of these is either the present work or the lithograph of the same subject which Lautrec executed specially for Andr Antoine. The lithograph (fig. 1) was the first design Lautrec had ever executed for the Thtre-Libre. It was used as the programme design for a double production of Une Faillite and Le Pote et le Financier staged in November 1893.
It is interesting to note that Lautrec also began his Elles series in 1893. The present work shares both the intimacy and the technique of several studies for this important series (see fig. 2).
Aside from the lithograph, there exist two studies for the oil executed in pen and black ink. Both are extremely small sketches and would appear to be studies from life (D.3.535 & D.4.263). La Coiffure is painted using the peinture l'essence method of which Danile Devynck writes, 'the finished work always looks strikingly spontaneous, as if it had been dashed off in a few moments, but in fact it marks the end of a long process that began with photographs, charcoal sketches, transfers, and studies on cardboard. On a bare cardboard surface, with rapid brushstrokes in purple, vermilion or carmine paint thinned with turpentine, the painter would sketch a face, a profile or a silhouette, adding only occasional white highlights or dark hatchings. The medium would immediately sink into the support, leaving only the pigment; works produced in this way are as matt as pastels, with extremely stable colours' (quoted in exh. cat., Toulouse-Lautrec, London, 1992, p. 56).
Sir Brinsley Ford recorded that, in the summer of 1935, at the age of twenty-seven, he visited an exhibition of Lautrec at the Kunsthalle Basel. He so admired the present work that he immediately bought it at a sterling equivalent of 350 (two years later his enthusiasm for Lautrec led him to take his wife on honeymoon to Albi to see the superb collection of Lautrecs in the museum).
It is recorded that Lautrec exhibited three works at the fifth Exposition des Peintres Impressionistes et Symbolistes at the Galerie Le Barc de Boutteville located at 47 rue le Peletier in the summer of 1893 where Vuillard, Gauguin, Denis and Bonnard were all regular exhibitors. Among the works by Lautrec shown in 1893 was an oil entitled Jacqueline (P.674), a poster, and what is described as the Programme pour le Thtre-Libre. The last of these is either the present work or the lithograph of the same subject which Lautrec executed specially for Andr Antoine. The lithograph (fig. 1) was the first design Lautrec had ever executed for the Thtre-Libre. It was used as the programme design for a double production of Une Faillite and Le Pote et le Financier staged in November 1893.
It is interesting to note that Lautrec also began his Elles series in 1893. The present work shares both the intimacy and the technique of several studies for this important series (see fig. 2).
Aside from the lithograph, there exist two studies for the oil executed in pen and black ink. Both are extremely small sketches and would appear to be studies from life (D.3.535 & D.4.263). La Coiffure is painted using the peinture l'essence method of which Danile Devynck writes, 'the finished work always looks strikingly spontaneous, as if it had been dashed off in a few moments, but in fact it marks the end of a long process that began with photographs, charcoal sketches, transfers, and studies on cardboard. On a bare cardboard surface, with rapid brushstrokes in purple, vermilion or carmine paint thinned with turpentine, the painter would sketch a face, a profile or a silhouette, adding only occasional white highlights or dark hatchings. The medium would immediately sink into the support, leaving only the pigment; works produced in this way are as matt as pastels, with extremely stable colours' (quoted in exh. cat., Toulouse-Lautrec, London, 1992, p. 56).
Sir Brinsley Ford recorded that, in the summer of 1935, at the age of twenty-seven, he visited an exhibition of Lautrec at the Kunsthalle Basel. He so admired the present work that he immediately bought it at a sterling equivalent of 350 (two years later his enthusiasm for Lautrec led him to take his wife on honeymoon to Albi to see the superb collection of Lautrecs in the museum).