Allegory - The spring of life

In 1883 Toulouse-Lautrec was 18 and a pupil in the studio of Fernand Cormon, at the foot of Montmartre. Cormon had made his name at the Salon of 1880 with a huge canvas of Cain and his clan trudging across a prehistoric wasteland, and the young men in his studio were drilled for exactly that kind of picture: large figure scenes with a mythic or allegorical subject, the usual road to Salon medals. This small canvas belongs to that ambition. A tiger crouches in a meadow beside a small child, a couple embrace on the right, and a ring of dancers turns in the distance, all laid in with quick, thin strokes and left at the stage of a sketch. The dance halls of the same neighbourhood, a short walk from Cormon's door, would soon give Lautrec very different subjects.