At the Moulin Rouge

Toulouse-Lautrec built this scene from the Montmartre dance hall around 1892, and the people at the table are his own crowd, named friends from the nightlife he lived in rather than watched. The woman with the flaming orange hair, seen from behind, is the dancer Jane Avril. Lautrec himself appears far in the back, a very short man beside a much taller cousin. Look at the face pushed up hard against the right edge, lit an eerie green from below. The canvas was cut down for years, that whole strip sliced off, and only later reassembled and restored. Lautrec was 27 when he made it, already a fixture at the Moulin Rouge, whose electric lights had opened only three years before.