Monsieur Louis Pascal

Louis Pascal was a cousin on the Bordeaux side of the family, a young man about town, and Lautrec painted him more than once. This portrait is dated 1893, the year he had his first one-man show in Paris, at a dealer's gallery on the boulevard Montmartre.

It is oil on a sheet of cardboard, 81 by 54 centimetres. Cardboard was his usual support, and he thinned his paint with turpentine so the board would drink it, which leaves the strokes dry and separate and lets the raw brown of the card stand in for a background.

After he died in 1901 his mother gave the contents of his studio to Albi, the town he was born in, and the museum opened in the old bishops' palace there in 1922.