Autoritratto di spalle

In 1884 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was 19 and a student in Fernand Cormon's Montmartre studio, still years away from the dance halls and posters that would make his name. He painted himself here from the back, which almost no portraitist does, so you get the turned shoulders and the head in profile rather than a face meeting yours. Up in the top corner he added a crude private joke in French about a bad smell. When the collector Leon Cligman later owned the picture, he had that line quietly painted over. Restorers at the Fontevraud museum, where it hangs now, lifted the covering layer away, and the young man's scribble is back in the corner where he first put it.