In tones of green and copper Toulouse-Lautrec has captured the tawdry gaiety of Montmartre’s most colorful night spot in the gay ’nineties. The Moulin Rouge, despite its name, was never a windmill; it is a dance hall which uses the sails of a mill for advertising. Lautrec frequented it because he enjoyed watching the nightly performances of its spirited dancers. Their specialty, the quadrille, grew out of the high-kicking cancan; almost as vigorous, it was even more complicated. Dominating the scene here, Gabrielle, a popular professional dancer, has hoisted her skirts as she lines up with the others to begin the dance. With telling outline, Lautrec characterizes her robust physique and hoydenish air. She is in sharp contrast to the woman facing her, in the foreground, whom Lautrec has shown as delicately refined.
Admiring Manet, Morisot, and especially Degas, Lautrec produced handsome compositions similar to theirs. Again, under the influence of Japanese prints, light and shadow have disappeared, replaced by bold color patterns and strong lines. But Lautrec was far more concerned with characterization than were the other painters of his time and, like Daumier in an earlier generation, he gives a wonderfully vivid picture of his age.
Gouache on cardboard. 31½ × 23¾ inches Painted 1892
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
La Mousmé
Chester Dale Collection
Loving the delicacy of Japanese art and having read about Japan, van Gogh named this young girl a “mousmé.” The word was taken from a romantic novel by Pierre Loti, who used it in describing the charm of the young Japanese tea-house attendants. Actually this subject was a peasant of Provence, in southern France. Van Gogh went there in 1888 hoping to capture in its bright sunshine some of the beauty he imagined in Japan.
With a very personal interpretation of Japanese style, he has shown this figure in a bold pattern of startling, bright colors. Earlier in Paris he had learned the color theories which Neo-Impressionists were applying to painting, and here his green, orange red, and intense blue are used with the purity that characterizes them in the spectrum. The Neo-Impressionists juxtaposed very small touches of such pure colors in order to suggest light even brighter than the Impressionists had achieved. But van Gogh was disinterested in effects of natural lighting. In this picture the girl is like a figure in an icon. Set against the plain, intense green background, she seems to be isolated from commonplace experience, and we are reminded of van Gogh’s stated aim, “I wish to paint men and women with that quality of the eternal which used to be suggested by the halo and which we attempt to give by the pure radiance and vibration of the colors.”
Canvas. 28⅞ × 23¾ inches Painted 1888