Spanish Dancer

By the museum's dating this was painted around 1883 to 1885, when Lautrec was about 20 and still a pupil in Parisian teaching studios, having started with the academic painter Léon Bonnat. A Spanish dancer was a well-worn French subject by then. Manet had painted Lola de Valence, the star of a Madrid troupe performing in Paris, back in 1862, and Spanish costume kept reappearing in French studios for decades afterwards. This is a young painter taking on a motif his teachers' generation had already made respectable.

The canvas stayed in private hands for more than a century. It reached the Van Gogh Museum in 2011, when the Dutch state accepted it from the heirs of the collector W.O. Koenigs in settlement of inheritance tax, a route Dutch law allows for objects worth keeping in the country, and it went on show in 2021 among a decade of the museum's acquisitions. Even the date remains open: other catalogues have placed it as late as 1888.