Carmen Gaudin in the Artist's Studio

In 1880s Paris a professional model was hired for how she looked, and the work carried a stigma that followed her outside the studio. Carmen Gaudin sat for Toulouse-Lautrec here in 1888, in his studio, wearing the white blouse of a laundress. Behind her the wall is crowded with canvases, their edges cutting hard angles across the background. Her hands rest in her lap with the fingers laced, rough from work, and she looks out with a closed, rather sullen face.

What kept her in work with Lautrec was her red hair. When she changed it to brown, he stopped hiring her. He signed this one lower right with a monogram, the H, T and L run together. The Boston collector John Taylor Spaulding bought it from a New York dealer in 1926, and it came to the museum with his bequest in 1948.