A Casual Conquest

In 1896 Toulouse-Lautrec was at work on "Elles," an album of lithographs about the women of the Montmartre brothels he knew well, shown not in the heat of seduction but pulling on a stocking, dozing, fixing their hair, the ordinary hours of a working life. This oil study belongs to that same world. A woman fills the canvas, fastening her corset, her bust worked up in detail while her skirt is barely brushed in. The man who has paid for her time is pushed to the very edge, almost cropped away, and yet Lautrec gives him the one fully finished face in the picture, so that our own attention follows his, tracking her every gesture. Lautrec's mother, the countess Adèle, left the painting to the museum in Toulouse in 1904, three years after his death.