Rue des Moulins, 1894

In the Paris of the 1890s the licensed brothels ran under a strict public-health regime, the women registered and required to submit to regular medical inspections for venereal disease. Toulouse-Lautrec spent months living inside these houses on the rue des Moulins, drawing the women off duty, and this picture shows a moment the outside world never saw. Two of them wait their turn for the inspection, shifts lifted, faces blank with routine. He paints them without titillation and without pity, the way you paint people you have come to know. The thinned oil on cardboard, rubbed and streaked, keeps everything quick and unfinished. Behind the two women a corridor recedes into brown, going nowhere in particular.