Oxen under the yoke

Two oxen, one tawny and one almost white, stand yoked to a farm cart under the trees, with a big spoked wheel filling the right edge of a small wooden panel. The Bordeaux museum dates it to around 1883. Lautrec was 18 that year and spent most of it in Paris, training in an academic studio where the working day went on drawing from the model. The subtitle, a memory of Malromé, names his mother's country house in the Gironde, in the wine country south-east of Bordeaux. Oxen under the yoke was a subject he kept coming back to. The catalogue of his paintings published in 1971 lists four others of it, made between 1880 and 1884. The city of Bordeaux bought this one in 1951 from the Séré de Rivière collection.