Study for In the Salon on the Rue des Moulins

In 1894 a Paris brothel was a licensed business. The house on the rue des Moulins, near the Palais-Royal, was registered with the police, and the women who worked there were examined by a doctor every fortnight. Lautrec lodged in it on and off that year, using the rooms as a studio and the residents as his models, and said he preferred them to professional models because they moved like people who were not being watched. This canvas is his working-out of the larger composition now in Albi, in the museum his mother and his dealer set up after his death. The woman at the left, Rolande, is close to caricature here, her flesh loose under the chemise, and in the finished painting he made her younger and smoother. In the same year he painted the women of that same house queuing in their shifts for the medical inspection.