Justine Dieuhl in the Garden of Père Forest

In the autumn of 1891 Toulouse-Lautrec's poster for the Moulin Rouge went up on walls all over Paris and made his name. In the same period he was spending his afternoons a few streets away, on a scruffy patch of ground at the corner of the boulevard de Clichy and the rue Caulaincourt that belonged to a man everyone called Père Forest, who rented it out for archery. For about two years Lautrec used it as an open-air studio, and the people he took there were not dancers or performers. Justine Dieuhl was a woman he knew from the neighbourhood, and she sits for him on a folding chair with the untended garden closing in behind her. He painted her on cardboard rather than canvas, which is what he used for most of this series.