Never exhibited during Toulouse-Lautrec’s lifetime, this painting has
been known by several different titles, all of which locate it in the louche underbelly of Paris’s fin-de-si?cle nightlife: the ‘Rat Mort’ (Dead Rat) was a notorious café-restaurant on the southern fringes of Montmartre which the artist is known to have frequented in his final years, and the private dining rooms (cabinets particuliers) on offer at such places were often used for amorous liaisons. The woman at the centre of the composition, with her heavily made-up face set aglow by sickly absinthe-green artificial light and her laughing mouth a vivid crimson slash, has traditionally been identified as Lucy Jourdain, a well-known cocotte, or high-class prostitute. Her elaborate costume is typical of those worn at masked balls; Toulouse- Lautrec establishes a startling formal rhyme between her gauzy pear- shaped hood and the bowl of fruit looming at an unsettling tilt in the foreground. The identity of the man beside her, his face brutally cropped by the edge of the canvas, has long been debated. Once described as Jourdain’s lover, Baron de W., who was said to have commissioned the painting (this is unlikely, given that the first owner was one of Toulouse- Lautrec’s cousins), it has recently been suggested that he is the Australian painter Charles Conder. In any case, the man’s faceless anonymity frustrates any attempt to decipher a narrative in the relationship between the two figures. The presence of the viewer (or artist) is implied by the placement of one of the champagne flutes. The flowing brushwork, with colour laid on in bold streaks, is enhanced by the use of paint greatly thinned with diluent. Together with the palette dominated by bold reds and greens and the blurry, hallucinatory effect of the lamplight, the
scene exudes the overripe sensuality and seedy glamour of Montmartre’s nightlife.

Inscription: inscription : signed : top right & recto : initials in monogram : T-Lautrec

Provenance:

G Sére de Rivi?res, Paris; with Georges Bernheim, Paris; Caressa, Paris; The Independent Gallery, London; purchased by Samuel Courtauld, March 1928; Courtauld Bequest, 1948.

Inventory number:

P.1948.SC.466