Клоунесса Ша-У-Као в Мулен Руж

Her stage name was two French words run together, chahut, the high-kicking dance of the period, and chaos, the racket that went up when she came on. Nobody now knows what she was really called, or when she was born. She clowned at the Nouveau Cirque and danced at the Moulin Rouge through the 1890s, in a trade that was almost entirely male, and she made no secret of living with women. Lautrec painted and drew her again and again in 1895 and 1896, always in the huge yellow ruff and the topknot she performed in. Oskar Reinhart, from a Winterthur trading family, bought this canvas for his house above the town, and the Swiss state, which he left it to, opened the house to visitors in 1970.