Femme de profil

Madame Lucy is the only name that comes with this picture, given as its second title, and the museum records nothing more about her. She survives as a profile, eyes lowered, under a hat heaped with dark plumes and flowers, with a white ruffle at her throat. Toulouse-Lautrec painted her in 1896 on grey-brown cardboard and left most of it bare. The face and hat are worked up, the shoulders are a few loose lines of blue, and flecks of turquoise stand in for whatever lay behind her. The painting belonged to Antonin Personnaz, a collector from Bayonne who bought the Impressionists and painters around them, and who in the 1900s took up early colour photography himself, on autochrome plates. He left his collection to the national museums, and this portrait entered the Louvre with it in 1937.