Émile Bernard

In 1885 both painter and sitter were students in the busy Paris studio of Fernand Cormon, a fashionable teacher of the day. Toulouse-Lautrec was 21, Émile Bernard about 18, and the two had lately become friends. The bright, feathery brushwork here owes something to the Pointillist experiments then filling the city's exhibitions. Bernard later recalled sitting 33 times for this small canvas, ten of those sessions given over entirely to the muted blue and yellow behind his head, while Lautrec struggled, in his phrase, to make the paint fit the face. Within a year Cormon expelled Bernard from the atelier, and he left to help invent a flatter, bolder kind of painting on the coast of Brittany.