Portrait of Octave Raquin

Octave Raquin was an architect, and a short walk from the Eiffel Tower you can still see his work. Around 1900 he designed a building at 33 rue du Champ-de-Mars to house a private school, and gave its façade carved flowers in the shape of arum lilies. Its street front and entrance hall are now protected as a historic monument. The São Paulo museum also credits him with the design of the racecourse at Tremblay, east of Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec painted him in 1901, seated in a dark suit with a shuttered window behind him, and wrote his own name, the year and Raquin's name in the upper left corner. The museum's catalogue compares the face, built up from short strokes laid side by side, with what Cézanne was doing in those same years. The portrait was given to the museum in 1952, five years after it opened, by a group of donors.