Alfred la Guigne

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

National Gallery of Art

A man and two women standing near a bar nearly fill this vertical painting. Though made with oil on cardboard, the paint is applied in thin strokes, so parts of the painting look more like a drawing, and the tan of the cardboard is visible in many areas. Shown from the thighs up at the center of the composition, the man stands with his back to us, looking away from us to our left, almost in profile. The camel-brown of the cardboard acts as the color of his jacket and the skin of his face, which are otherwise delineated with cobalt-blue and violet-purple lines. He wears a dark bowler hat, and a white cigarette dangles in his lips. A few scribbled black lines could suggest a mustache. Hands thrust into his pockets, he looks down at the bar, which a runs along left edge of the composition. Squeezed between the man and the glasses on the bar, a woman wearing a teal-blue feather boa leans one elbow on the bar and looks back at the man from the corners of her eyes. Her skin is rose-pink and she has curly red hair. Her arched, thin eyebrows and snub nose are set in a round face with a double chin, and her crimson-red lips are pursed. She wears a ruby-red dress or coat and a turquoise-blue, wide-brimmed hat with bubblegum-pink ribbons or feathers. Two small, stemmed glasses sit on the bar in front of the man and woman. Behind the bar, along the left edge of the painting, a man wears a dark vest over a shirt with sky-blue sleeves. A light cloth lies over the shoulder closer to us and he has dark hair. The rest of his features are lost behind the woman’s hat. To our right, beyond the man’s shoulder, a woman stands with her body facing us as she tips back and looks off to our right. She wears a long, black tie over a pale blue, high-necked shirt. One hand is tucked into a pocket on the front of her jacket, which is streaked with mint green over the brown cardboard. Loosely painted vertical stripes below her waist suggests she wears a skirt, indicating this is a woman, though it might otherwise be difficult to tell. She wears a low, royal-blue cap with an emerald-green feather curling up from the back over a cloud of yellow hair. Only the gray bowler hat, ruddy skin around the ear, and a teal-green jacket of a fifth person are visible between that woman and the right edge of the composition. The wall at the back of the space is tan with shell-pink streaks, and a sign with a red triangle against a turquoise background is cropped by the right edge of the painting. The scene is sketchily painted so features are outlined with blue or brown and filled in with streaks of pale color. The artist inscribed the painting in the lower right corner, “pour Metenier d'apres son Alfred la Guigne HTLautrec,” with the HTL overlapping to create a monogram.