Le Docteur Tapié de Céleyran

In 1894 Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran, Toulouse-Lautrec's cousin, was a medical student in Paris, working as an intern and assistant to the surgeon Jules-Émile Péan. Through him Lautrec got into the operating theatre and painted Péan at work, and Gabriel in return went along on his cousin's nights out. For this full-length portrait Lautrec placed him somewhere else entirely, in a corridor of the Comédie-Française, the national theatre in Paris. Gabriel comes towards us over a bright red carpet in a top hat, while behind him three figures with harsh, expressionistic faces stand talking. The canvas is almost twice as tall as it is wide, 110 by 56 centimetres, room enough for a sitter known for his height. Gabriel kept the picture for nearly 30 years and gave it to the Toulouse-Lautrec museum in Albi in 1922, the year it opened.