Cleveland Museum of Art

Monsieur Boileau at the Café

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Date

1893

Medium

oil and tempera with charcoal on millboard

Culture

France, 19th century

Department

Drawings

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Cleveland’s 1925 purchase of this work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec marked the first acquisition of one of the artist’s drawings by a museum in the United States. Its subject, Monsieur Boileau, was a gossip columnist known to drink heavily at Le Mirliton, a nightclub. Here, saturated, acidic tones evoke the room’s gas lamps and thinned oil paint absorbs into its support, producing texture that complements the scene’s grittiness. In his own time, Toulouse-Lautrec was considered a portraitist for such depictions of friends and other inhabitants of his neighborhood. He preferred drawing for its immediacy, using it to record his sitters’ personalities through materials and formal choices. The green drink on the table is probably absinthe, a popular drink with artists at the time that was thought to have hallucinogenic properties.

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