The Two Friends

In 1894 the brothels of Paris were legal businesses, licensed and supervised by the police, and Toulouse-Lautrec spent days at a time inside them. The women there accepted him as a friend, and between 1892 and 1895 he drew and painted them in the ordinary hours of the day, resting, talking, waiting. This small painting on board was probably made in the house on the Rue des Moulins. Tate suggests it may be a study for a much larger canvas of the same year, In the Salon at the Rue des Moulins, now in the Toulouse-Lautrec museum in Albi. That picture shows the same corner of the room with more space and four more women, and the pose here only loosely matches it, as if he were still trying ideas. His monogram sits in the lower left corner. The British collector Montague Shearman bought the panel in 1936 and left it to the Contemporary Art Society, which gave it to the Tate in 1940.