Backstage (The Streetwalker)

Toulouse-Lautrec was 23 when he brushed this onto a piece of already worn cardboard in 1888, leaving large patches of the brown support bare. The model is Carmen Gaudin, a red-haired working woman he had noticed in the street and went on to paint about 15 times in different guises. Here she is a pierreuse, the harshest word Paris had for a street prostitute, caught in a doorway with the space beyond her cut off by the frame. The museum in Tournai traces that lopsided framing to a photograph of her taken the year before by Maurice Guibert, a champagne salesman and friend of the painter. Photography was still new enough as a way of looking that its accidents, a head clipped by the edge, a figure jammed into a corner, were only starting to turn up in paint.