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Dimensions: 70.5 by 55 cm., 27 3/4 by 21 5/8 in.
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Provenance: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE BRITISH COLLECTION
Eduard Borderie, Paris (1946)
Bernard and Betty French (acquired from the above in 1947)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1981-82
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Notes: The pastels and paintings produced by Louis Anquetin in the late 1880s and early 1890s constitute an important body of work that influenced a number of avant-garde contemporaries, especially his friends Vincent van Gogh, Emile Bernard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, all of whom he met in the studio of the academic painter Cormon. In fact, of these four artists, it was Anquetin who received the first serious attention from art critics at the time, most famously in Edouard Dujardin's essay on Cloisonisme published in 1888 in La Revue indépendante. Dujardin explained that the strong outlines and flat planes of colour in Anquetin's work relate to the flat enamel technique of cloisonné as well as the formal compositions seen in Japanese prints. Instead of attempting to create a unified scene based on the naturalist light of the impressionists, the cloisonist painter works 'by compartments'.
In the present work, Anquetin has captured the eerie thrill of a Paris brothel by concentrating on a few figures, drawn with clear black outlines, and depicted with jarring planes of colour. He arranged the central figures in a type of jigsaw pattern that was an important compositional tool of cloisonist painting. The exaggerated bosom of the woman in green fits right against the curve of the other woman's back. And the angled pose of the thinner woman's hand, fan and skirt run just along the head and shoulders of the woman in the foreground. With this compressed arrangement, Anquetin communicates the feeling of walking through the meeting space of one of Paris's fashionable brothels: a space crowded with women on display, in dresses, hats and hair whose colours blaze under the gaslight of the chandeliers. It is a scene that one would normally associate with the work of Anquetin's good friend Toulouse-Lautrec, but Lautrec did not begin to depict the Paris brothels until the mid 1890s (fig. 1). At that point Anquetin had rejected his modern style of painting for a return to academic painting, but Lautrec's intimate views of the brothels of the Rue des Moulins were obviously indebted to his friendship with Anquetin.
In the mirror at upper right is a hint that Anquetin did not visit these brothels alone, as the casually posed figure in the middle of the mirror may well be a self-portrait. To the left of this figure is a striking green profile that looks suspiciously like that of Emile Bernard, and finally in the right of the mirror is the unmistakable silhouette of Toulouse-Lautrec (fig. 2). Curiously, just to the right of this silhouette is Lautrec's monogram, a hint that Lautrec himself may have added his own silhouette to this work, then marked it with his signature, suggesting a collaboration that illustrates how closely this group of artists worked together at the time, and how central Anquetin's work should be to our understanding of this period.
Fig. 1, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Au Salon de la Rue des Moulins, circa 1894, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi, detail
Fig. 2, The present work, detail
