Mujer con sombrilla

For a couple of years around 1889 Toulouse-Lautrec, better known for the smoky interiors of Montmartre, took his easel outdoors. A neighbour called Pere Forest let him use the overgrown garden behind his house, and there Lautrec set friends and models among the leaves and painted them in daylight. He called these self-set exercises his impositions. The woman here, seated with a parasol, was known as Berthe la Sourde, Berthe the Deaf. He worked fast, thinning his oils almost to watercolour and letting the tan of the cardboard show through the greens, the whole study done in an afternoon or two.