Jane Avril bailando

The dancer is Jane Avril, the strangest star of the Moulin Rouge — the huge Montmartre dance hall that had opened in 1889 and turned Paris nightlife into a spectacle the whole city came to watch. Among its high-kicking chorus she stood apart. Pale, reserved, almost sad-looking, she usually danced alone. As a girl she had spent time in the Salpêtrière, the Paris hospital for nervous and mental illness, treated for a condition that jerked her limbs beyond her control. By the story she always told, it was at a patients' ball there that she first found she could dance. Lautrec, himself an outsider in that crowd, painted and drew her again and again. Here he thinned his oil almost to watercolour and let the whole figure come down to a few quick strokes: the tilt of the body, the lift of the skirt, one leg caught mid-kick.