The Ladies in the Dining Room

Paris brothels in the 1890s were licensed, inspected and on the police register, and the women who worked in them lived on the premises. That is the situation this picture is about. Toulouse-Lautrec spent long stretches between 1893 and 1895 inside one of them, the house on the rue des Moulins, and what he painted there was mostly the hours when nothing was happening. Here the women are at their communal meal, at the table in ordinary clothes with the flat, closed expressions of people in a canteen. The word he used for the room, refectoire, is the word for the dining hall of a convent or a boarding school. It is oil on cardboard, thinned and brushed on fast, which is how he made most of this series.