At the Café La Mie

Around 1891 Toulouse-Lautrec was making his name in the cabarets of Montmartre, the same year he designed his famous Moulin Rouge poster. For this scene he did something modern. He staged a photograph first. His friend Maurice Guibert, a cheerful man about town, sat for the camera playing a shabby deadbeat slumped over a table beside a woman, and Lautrec worked the painting up from the print. The title comes from Paris slang for a customer who cheats a prostitute of her fee, which tells you who these two are meant to be. Guibert's flushed, sour face does the rest. Lautrec liked photographs as a starting point and used them throughout the 1880s and after.