Messalina

In the winter of 1900 Toulouse-Lautrec was in Bordeaux, his health wrecked by drink and barely a year of life left. There he sat through Isidore de Lara's opera Messaline, a lurid tale of the Roman empress and her lovers, and was so carried away that he kept shouting his approval across the theatre until the other spectators glared. The obsession followed him home. He worked up six canvases from the production, and this is one of them. He takes the scene from the side, close to the stage, the way someone in the wings would catch it, an off-centre framing he had picked up from Japanese prints. The reds and greens are deliberately harsh, pitched to a plot that ends with the empress's lovers dead. He finished paintings like this one in 1901, the year he died at 36.