A Woman Seated in a Garden

Around 1890 Lautrec was taking models into a public garden a few streets from his studio in Montmartre and posing them there in daylight. He was 25, and the Moulin Rouge had opened at the foot of the hill the year before. He worked in essence, oil thinned with turpentine so that it dries fast and sinks into the surface with no shine, on a piece of cardboard about 50 centimetres tall. The garden pictures were stock for him. Figures settled in the open air come back later, rearranged and in different clothes, inside the crowded dance halls he painted at night.