Prüfung an der medizinischen Fakultät von Paris

This is the last painting Toulouse-Lautrec finished. He made it in 1901, the year he died at 36, his body worn out by illness and drink. The subject is a medical thesis defence, and the young man facing the two dark-robed examiners is his own cousin and close companion, Gabriel Tapie de Celeyran, who had trained as a doctor. Lautrec knew this room from the other side. Fragile since childhood, with legs that had stopped growing early, he had spent a lifetime being examined by physicians. The bright cabaret colours of his Montmartre posters are gone here. The professors loom in heavy shadow, lit as though by a single lamp, and the whole canvas has turned sober and brown.