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拍品专文
During the final decade of the nineteenth century, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec went behind the doors of les maisons closes – the legal, regulated houses of prostitution in Paris – to reveal the intimate, everyday lives of those he called ‘les fonctionnières de l’amour.’ Widely considered among the artist’s most famous and celebrated compositions, these artworks occupied Toulouse-Lautrec extensively through these years – he created as many as seventy works on the theme between 1892 and 1895, plus another dozen pictures in related situations, outnumbering the cabaret, theatre, circus, or any other single subject grouping in the artist’s oeuvre. Painted in 1894, La femme tatouée is an extraordinary example from the series, marrying Toulouse-Lautrec’s trademark skills of acute observation with a vivid painterly finish. Working in his characteristic technique à l’essence – diluting his oil paints with turpentine to create a fluid, linear medium that was quick to apply and easy to work with – the artist draws our attention to the daily rituals that punctuated the lives of the inhabitants of les maisons closes, in this case, the quiet exchange between two women as they help one another dress.
In early 1889, Toulouse-Lautrec had completed Au bal du Moulin de la Galette (Dortu, no. P. 335; The Art Institute of Chicago), his first multi-figure masterwork of bohemian nightlife in Montmartre. Over the following months, the artist was eager to undertake a large decorative commission, a major canvas that would consolidate his growing reputation as one the leading young painters in Paris. His first opportunity, however, came from an unexpected source. Blanche d’Egmont, the maîtresse of the maison close on the rue d’Amboise, asked Toulouse-Lautrec to paint medallion-shaped portraits of sixteen women in her employ. Intended to advertise these ladies’ charms to prospective clients, the series of small paintings were set into panels that lined the establishment’s elegant eighteenth-century style grand salon (Dortu, nos. P. 440-457).
Toulouse-Lautrec took care to give individual character and likeness to each of the filles de maison in the rue d’Amboise portraits. A congenital bone condition, combined with a series of accidents as a youth, had left the artist with a serious physical impairment that greatly affected not only how others viewed him, but also his sense of self. As a result, Toulouse-Lautrec found an affinity with figures on the margins of society, from dancers and entertainers in Paris’s well-known music halls and theatres, to prostitutes and circus performers. His friendships with the denizens of the city’s demi-monde allowed him to portray their lives and circumstances with empathy and a distinct sensitivity that set him apart from many of his contemporaries.
While his visits to Mme d’Egmont’s establishment appear to have lit the initial spark of inspiration for the artist’s depictions of les maisons closes, it is not clear where Toulouse-Lautrec painted his subsequent brothel paintings, though he likely frequented several maisons in the quartier around the Opéra and the Bibliothèque Nationale during these years. These highly regulated establishments were in decline through the latter half of the nineteenth century, their numbers dwindling as women found more independent means of plying their trade. For Toulouse-Lautrec, les maisons closes represented a rapidly disappearing world, a familiar aspect of Parisian life that was being subsumed by the encroaching tide of modernity. While he may have begun some smaller compositions in situ during his visits to a select maison close, others more likely proceeded from sketches and drawings; he then worked up and completed the paintings in his studio, located at 27 (now 21) rue Caulaincourt, from which it was but a short walk to the Moulin de la Galette, in Montmartre.
In many ways, Toulouse-Lautrec enjoyed an unprecedented freedom of access behind-the-scenes of his chosen maisons closes, and spent extended periods of time immersed in their world. ‘He became, in a sense, one of the family of the women in the brothels,’ Julia Frey has written, ‘a friend and confidant, eating meals with them, getting to know their problems, participating in their gossip, observing them in their various occupations and pleasures…’ (Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, London, 1994, p. 345). As a result, he was granted a rare insight to the private hidden lives of these women, looking beyond the sensational, transactional nature of their work, and instead revealing the simple rhythms of their days. Across the dozens of works he completed on the theme, Toulouse-Lautrec depicted almost every aspect of daily life in the shuttered environment of the Parisian brothel: lunching in the réfectoire (Dortu, no. P. 499; Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, Budapest), the morning pickup of the laundry (Dortu, no. P. 544; Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi), women playing cards and otherwise passing the daytime hours, until they readied themselves for the evening trade. In the majority of the scenes, men are noticeably absent – instead, it is the private world of the women that take centre stage, the various characters tending to their toilette, dressing, or dozing in bed during their downtime.
Crucially for Toulouse-Lautrec, who only painted people whom he found interesting, the women he met in les maisons closes held a greater sense of character and personality than traditional models. ‘Models always look as if they were stuffed,’ he explained. ‘These women are alive. I wouldn’t dare pay them to pose for me, yet God knows they’re worth it… They’re so lacking in pretension, you know’ (quoted in H. Perruchot, Toulouse-Lautrec, London, 1960, p. 157). As a result, his depictions of the women he encountered were infused with a distinct individuality, each scene capturing a personal and sympathetic view of their lives. ‘They were his friends as well as his models,’ remarked the artist’s friend and muse Jane Avril. ‘He in turn had an uplifting effect on them. In his presence they were just women, and he treated them as equals’ (quoted in D. Sweetman, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Fin-de-Siècle, London, 1999, p. 341).
This approach is vividly expressed in La femme tatouée. Here, two women are seen in the closeted interior of a maison close, standing one in front of the other so that the figure in the foreground can receive help tying the elaborate red bows and ribbons of her chemise. The same pairing appear in another of Toulouse-Lautrec’s compositions from this period, Femme qui tire son bas (Dortu, no. P. 552; Musée d’Orsay, Paris), offering an alternative view on the theme of dressing, in which the blonde woman pulls on her stockings while her dark-haired companion sits close-by, as if they are in the middle of a conversation. There is a casual intimacy in their exchanges as they ready themselves for the evening, a familiarity and ease that suggests they know one another well. As with his depictions of nightclubs and dance halls, Toulouse-Lautrec’s focus lies primarily on his figures, the surrounding details of the maison close only loosely indicated, from the small pot on the nearby sideboard, to the large mirror that hangs on the adjoining wall but seems to disappear into the dark wallpaper, only revealed to the viewer through the reflections of the two women glimpsed in its surface.
At the same time, both women’s features are loosely sketched, their likenesses quickly rendered with swift strokes of the artist’s brush, with certain elements highlighted by the garish tones of their make-up. The thinner, dark-haired woman hovers on the brink of caricature, her elongated nose and dramatically pointed chin demonstrating Toulouse-Lautrec’s penchant for exaggeration, recalling some of his more distorted depictions of Yvette Guilbert from this period. Since his teenage years, the artist had frequently drawn amusing caricatures of himself, his friends and loved ones, incorporating the typical idiom of the comic portrait to create witty records of his acquaintances. This visual language also bled into his painterly style, allowing him to create ‘types’ of characters that filled his dynamic scenes of Parisian nightlife, their gestures, body language and expressions accentuated and heightened to create a quickly legible description of their personalities and their role in the events depicted. In the case of the central blonde figure in La femme tatouée, her facial features are only summarily recorded, her small nose, full cheeks, pillowy lips and soft jawline delineated in quick, overlapping strokes of paint. Instead, her most distinguishing feature is the softly swirling tattoo inked on her upper arm, which gives the painting its intriguing title.
There was a growing trend for tattoos in Paris through the final decades of the nineteenth century among both the working class and the fashionable elite, aided by the rise of professional tattooists who set up dedicated shops and parlours across the city. The practice quickly spread through all aspects of Parisian society – simultaneously inspired by sailors and officers returning from Pacific voyages and the tattooed performers who took part in displays at both circuses and fairs, women and men alike adopted the practice as a form of personal adornment, their tattoos ranging from the highly personal, to a series of generic designs that were considered in vogue. In La femme tatouée, a semi-abstract, flowing network of lines swirl together across the woman’s arm, their wave-like forms overlapping and interlocking in a softly undulating pattern. Below, a series of briefly sketched marks suggest numbers, initials or even a name, perhaps an ode to a loved one or a lost paramour. While the meaning behind these marks remains elusive, perhaps known only to the woman herself, Toulouse-Lautrec grants them a clear prominence within the scene, emphasising the manner in which the dark ink punctuates her otherwise unblemished, pale, smooth skin.
By featuring the woman’s tattoo, Toulouse-Lautrec may have been subtly referencing his indebtedness to Japanese ukiyo-e woodcut prints, which had an extraordinary impact on the French avant-garde during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Inspired by their vivid, flat colours, strong contours and non-linear perspective, Toulouse-Lautrec became an avid collector of Japanese prints, and began to translate their compositional principles into his own work. He was also intrigued by their daring subject matter, particularly the many depictions of courtesans – in both erotic and mundane scenes – that proliferated through Paris during this period. For example, in his renowned portfolio of prints known as Elles, Toulouse-Lautrec drew direct inspiration from Kitagawa Utamaro’s Seiro juni toki tsuzuki (The twelve hours in the pleasure quarter), first published circa 1794, in which the artist depicted the activities of the women in a brothel in Yoshiwara, the amusement district of Edo, over the course of a single day.
In La femme tatouée, Toulouse-Lautrec appears to draw inspiration from the clearly tattooed courtesans who occasionally featured within larger ukiyo-e brothel scenes, the intricate Japanese characters inked on their arms most often a reference to a lover who occupies their thoughts. A similar mood appears to grip Toulouse-Lautrec’s protagonist in the present scene – closing her eyes, she seems to turn inwards, perhaps lost in her memories as she dreams of the person who captured her heart and left such an indelible mark on her.
La femme tatouée was most likely among the paintings included in Toulouse-Lautrec’s solo-exhibition in 1896 at the Galerie Manzi-Joyant. According to contemporary reports, the paintings featuring scenes from les maisons closes were separated from the rest of the exhibition, hidden in a back room and available for viewing to only a select few privileged connoisseurs, friends and collectors. As Richard Thomson has noted, ‘It is possible that [Toulouse-Lautrec] was anxious about censorship. The police had required one of his lesbian pictures to be removed from Le Barc’s window in 1892, and Arthur Huc remembered the artist’s telling him that he would try to avoid a scandal by not exhibiting the Salon of the Rue des Moulins’ (quoted in R. Thomson, P.D. Cate and M.W. Chapin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, exh. cat., The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2005, p. 209).
Half a century later, these reservations and concerns regarding the propriety of Toulouse-Lautrec’s subject matter had dissipated, and La femme tatouée was featured in the XXIV Biennale di Venezia, the first edition of the event to be held following the end of the Second World War. Staged in 1948, the Biennale included art historical exhibitions for the first time, most notably an important survey of French Impressionism curated by Roberto Longhi. Alongside works by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec was represented by ten artworks, each of which represented key aspects of his oeuvre. La femme tatouée was loaned to the Biennale by the family of the present owner, who had acquired it from Jos Hessel in 1922. The work has occupied a central place within the family’s renowned collection for the last century, and comes to auction for the first time in its history.
In early 1889, Toulouse-Lautrec had completed Au bal du Moulin de la Galette (Dortu, no. P. 335; The Art Institute of Chicago), his first multi-figure masterwork of bohemian nightlife in Montmartre. Over the following months, the artist was eager to undertake a large decorative commission, a major canvas that would consolidate his growing reputation as one the leading young painters in Paris. His first opportunity, however, came from an unexpected source. Blanche d’Egmont, the maîtresse of the maison close on the rue d’Amboise, asked Toulouse-Lautrec to paint medallion-shaped portraits of sixteen women in her employ. Intended to advertise these ladies’ charms to prospective clients, the series of small paintings were set into panels that lined the establishment’s elegant eighteenth-century style grand salon (Dortu, nos. P. 440-457).
Toulouse-Lautrec took care to give individual character and likeness to each of the filles de maison in the rue d’Amboise portraits. A congenital bone condition, combined with a series of accidents as a youth, had left the artist with a serious physical impairment that greatly affected not only how others viewed him, but also his sense of self. As a result, Toulouse-Lautrec found an affinity with figures on the margins of society, from dancers and entertainers in Paris’s well-known music halls and theatres, to prostitutes and circus performers. His friendships with the denizens of the city’s demi-monde allowed him to portray their lives and circumstances with empathy and a distinct sensitivity that set him apart from many of his contemporaries.
While his visits to Mme d’Egmont’s establishment appear to have lit the initial spark of inspiration for the artist’s depictions of les maisons closes, it is not clear where Toulouse-Lautrec painted his subsequent brothel paintings, though he likely frequented several maisons in the quartier around the Opéra and the Bibliothèque Nationale during these years. These highly regulated establishments were in decline through the latter half of the nineteenth century, their numbers dwindling as women found more independent means of plying their trade. For Toulouse-Lautrec, les maisons closes represented a rapidly disappearing world, a familiar aspect of Parisian life that was being subsumed by the encroaching tide of modernity. While he may have begun some smaller compositions in situ during his visits to a select maison close, others more likely proceeded from sketches and drawings; he then worked up and completed the paintings in his studio, located at 27 (now 21) rue Caulaincourt, from which it was but a short walk to the Moulin de la Galette, in Montmartre.
In many ways, Toulouse-Lautrec enjoyed an unprecedented freedom of access behind-the-scenes of his chosen maisons closes, and spent extended periods of time immersed in their world. ‘He became, in a sense, one of the family of the women in the brothels,’ Julia Frey has written, ‘a friend and confidant, eating meals with them, getting to know their problems, participating in their gossip, observing them in their various occupations and pleasures…’ (Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, London, 1994, p. 345). As a result, he was granted a rare insight to the private hidden lives of these women, looking beyond the sensational, transactional nature of their work, and instead revealing the simple rhythms of their days. Across the dozens of works he completed on the theme, Toulouse-Lautrec depicted almost every aspect of daily life in the shuttered environment of the Parisian brothel: lunching in the réfectoire (Dortu, no. P. 499; Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, Budapest), the morning pickup of the laundry (Dortu, no. P. 544; Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi), women playing cards and otherwise passing the daytime hours, until they readied themselves for the evening trade. In the majority of the scenes, men are noticeably absent – instead, it is the private world of the women that take centre stage, the various characters tending to their toilette, dressing, or dozing in bed during their downtime.
Crucially for Toulouse-Lautrec, who only painted people whom he found interesting, the women he met in les maisons closes held a greater sense of character and personality than traditional models. ‘Models always look as if they were stuffed,’ he explained. ‘These women are alive. I wouldn’t dare pay them to pose for me, yet God knows they’re worth it… They’re so lacking in pretension, you know’ (quoted in H. Perruchot, Toulouse-Lautrec, London, 1960, p. 157). As a result, his depictions of the women he encountered were infused with a distinct individuality, each scene capturing a personal and sympathetic view of their lives. ‘They were his friends as well as his models,’ remarked the artist’s friend and muse Jane Avril. ‘He in turn had an uplifting effect on them. In his presence they were just women, and he treated them as equals’ (quoted in D. Sweetman, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Fin-de-Siècle, London, 1999, p. 341).
This approach is vividly expressed in La femme tatouée. Here, two women are seen in the closeted interior of a maison close, standing one in front of the other so that the figure in the foreground can receive help tying the elaborate red bows and ribbons of her chemise. The same pairing appear in another of Toulouse-Lautrec’s compositions from this period, Femme qui tire son bas (Dortu, no. P. 552; Musée d’Orsay, Paris), offering an alternative view on the theme of dressing, in which the blonde woman pulls on her stockings while her dark-haired companion sits close-by, as if they are in the middle of a conversation. There is a casual intimacy in their exchanges as they ready themselves for the evening, a familiarity and ease that suggests they know one another well. As with his depictions of nightclubs and dance halls, Toulouse-Lautrec’s focus lies primarily on his figures, the surrounding details of the maison close only loosely indicated, from the small pot on the nearby sideboard, to the large mirror that hangs on the adjoining wall but seems to disappear into the dark wallpaper, only revealed to the viewer through the reflections of the two women glimpsed in its surface.
At the same time, both women’s features are loosely sketched, their likenesses quickly rendered with swift strokes of the artist’s brush, with certain elements highlighted by the garish tones of their make-up. The thinner, dark-haired woman hovers on the brink of caricature, her elongated nose and dramatically pointed chin demonstrating Toulouse-Lautrec’s penchant for exaggeration, recalling some of his more distorted depictions of Yvette Guilbert from this period. Since his teenage years, the artist had frequently drawn amusing caricatures of himself, his friends and loved ones, incorporating the typical idiom of the comic portrait to create witty records of his acquaintances. This visual language also bled into his painterly style, allowing him to create ‘types’ of characters that filled his dynamic scenes of Parisian nightlife, their gestures, body language and expressions accentuated and heightened to create a quickly legible description of their personalities and their role in the events depicted. In the case of the central blonde figure in La femme tatouée, her facial features are only summarily recorded, her small nose, full cheeks, pillowy lips and soft jawline delineated in quick, overlapping strokes of paint. Instead, her most distinguishing feature is the softly swirling tattoo inked on her upper arm, which gives the painting its intriguing title.
There was a growing trend for tattoos in Paris through the final decades of the nineteenth century among both the working class and the fashionable elite, aided by the rise of professional tattooists who set up dedicated shops and parlours across the city. The practice quickly spread through all aspects of Parisian society – simultaneously inspired by sailors and officers returning from Pacific voyages and the tattooed performers who took part in displays at both circuses and fairs, women and men alike adopted the practice as a form of personal adornment, their tattoos ranging from the highly personal, to a series of generic designs that were considered in vogue. In La femme tatouée, a semi-abstract, flowing network of lines swirl together across the woman’s arm, their wave-like forms overlapping and interlocking in a softly undulating pattern. Below, a series of briefly sketched marks suggest numbers, initials or even a name, perhaps an ode to a loved one or a lost paramour. While the meaning behind these marks remains elusive, perhaps known only to the woman herself, Toulouse-Lautrec grants them a clear prominence within the scene, emphasising the manner in which the dark ink punctuates her otherwise unblemished, pale, smooth skin.
By featuring the woman’s tattoo, Toulouse-Lautrec may have been subtly referencing his indebtedness to Japanese ukiyo-e woodcut prints, which had an extraordinary impact on the French avant-garde during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Inspired by their vivid, flat colours, strong contours and non-linear perspective, Toulouse-Lautrec became an avid collector of Japanese prints, and began to translate their compositional principles into his own work. He was also intrigued by their daring subject matter, particularly the many depictions of courtesans – in both erotic and mundane scenes – that proliferated through Paris during this period. For example, in his renowned portfolio of prints known as Elles, Toulouse-Lautrec drew direct inspiration from Kitagawa Utamaro’s Seiro juni toki tsuzuki (The twelve hours in the pleasure quarter), first published circa 1794, in which the artist depicted the activities of the women in a brothel in Yoshiwara, the amusement district of Edo, over the course of a single day.
In La femme tatouée, Toulouse-Lautrec appears to draw inspiration from the clearly tattooed courtesans who occasionally featured within larger ukiyo-e brothel scenes, the intricate Japanese characters inked on their arms most often a reference to a lover who occupies their thoughts. A similar mood appears to grip Toulouse-Lautrec’s protagonist in the present scene – closing her eyes, she seems to turn inwards, perhaps lost in her memories as she dreams of the person who captured her heart and left such an indelible mark on her.
La femme tatouée was most likely among the paintings included in Toulouse-Lautrec’s solo-exhibition in 1896 at the Galerie Manzi-Joyant. According to contemporary reports, the paintings featuring scenes from les maisons closes were separated from the rest of the exhibition, hidden in a back room and available for viewing to only a select few privileged connoisseurs, friends and collectors. As Richard Thomson has noted, ‘It is possible that [Toulouse-Lautrec] was anxious about censorship. The police had required one of his lesbian pictures to be removed from Le Barc’s window in 1892, and Arthur Huc remembered the artist’s telling him that he would try to avoid a scandal by not exhibiting the Salon of the Rue des Moulins’ (quoted in R. Thomson, P.D. Cate and M.W. Chapin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, exh. cat., The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2005, p. 209).
Half a century later, these reservations and concerns regarding the propriety of Toulouse-Lautrec’s subject matter had dissipated, and La femme tatouée was featured in the XXIV Biennale di Venezia, the first edition of the event to be held following the end of the Second World War. Staged in 1948, the Biennale included art historical exhibitions for the first time, most notably an important survey of French Impressionism curated by Roberto Longhi. Alongside works by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec was represented by ten artworks, each of which represented key aspects of his oeuvre. La femme tatouée was loaned to the Biennale by the family of the present owner, who had acquired it from Jos Hessel in 1922. The work has occupied a central place within the family’s renowned collection for the last century, and comes to auction for the first time in its history.