Louis Bouglé

Louis Bouglé belonged to the Paris cycling world of the 1890s. He raced under the name Spoke, wrote about the sport, and ran the French branch of Simpson, a London maker of bicycle chains. In 1896 he had his friend Toulouse-Lautrec design a poster for the Simpson chain, with the racer Constant Huret bent low over his machine on the track. Two years later Lautrec painted Bouglé off duty, sitting on the quay at Arromanches on the Normandy coast, legs crossed, his hands busy with something in his lap. The picture is painted on a wooden panel, and broad areas of bare brown wood are left showing around him. The collector André Berthellemy gave it to the national museums in 1930, on condition that he could keep it for the rest of his life, and it entered the Louvre in 1943.