Vista de la bahía de Arcachon tomada desde la proa del yate Cocorico

1889 was the year Paris opened its Exposition Universelle under the new Eiffel Tower, and the year the Moulin Rouge opened in Montmartre, a few streets from Toulouse-Lautrec's studio. He was 24, and the cabaret pictures that made his name were still ahead of him. This small panel belongs to the other side of that year, the Bassin d'Arcachon on the Atlantic coast, painted from the front of a yacht called Cocorico. Sailing and swimming were among the few physical things his legs, broken in his teens and never properly grown after, still allowed him, and he went back to that stretch of water for the rest of his life. The panel is in Albi, in the museum formed around the works his mother offered the town after he died in 1901.