La rousse avec chemisier blanc

The model here is Carmen Gaudin, a working woman from Montmartre with the copper-red hair that gives the picture its title. Toulouse-Lautrec had spotted her in the street around 1885 and was struck less by conventional beauty than by that hair and her worn, ordinary face, and he brought her back to pose again and again over several years. He painted this in 1889, the year the Moulin Rouge opened a short walk from his studio and the district he lived in was turning into the nightlife capital of Paris. She is not dressed as a dancer or a temptation. She sits in a plain white blouse, caught mid-thought, the loose brushwork left unfinished around her steady profile.