Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
French, 1864 – 1901
Poster for La Troupe de Mademoiselle Églantine (The Troupe of Mademoiselle Églantine), 1896
Color lithograph on wove paper
24-1/4 x 31-1/2 in.
Museum Purchase, Peter M. Wege, 2005.4

Jane Avril, a star performer in the cabarets of Montmartre, commissioned this poster for the Églantine dancers' first and only London appearance. It shows the members of the high-kicking Parisian troupe – Jane Avril, Cléopatre, Églantine, and Gazelle. They are engaged in the lively can-can &ndash a leg-baring, risqué dance that was the rage in the cabarets of Montmartre. Although Lautrec made a preparatory oil sketch for the poster, he based the composition on a photograph. From both photograph and sketch he extracted the simplified lines for the poster and created a sharp caricature of each dancer. Jealousies divided the dancers into two camps: Avril and Églantine against Cléopatre and Gazelle. Lautrec seems to have enjoyed choreographing their rivalry in an iconic image of Parisian nightlife.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born into an aristocratic French family. Against his family wishes, he pursued art as a profession, studying with established academic painters and then joining more progressive artists' circles in Paris. Although a sensitive portraitist of his bohemian friends and cabaret performers in Montmartre, Lautrec is best known for his color lithography. During the 1890s, the last decade of his life, he became a master of lithography, amassing a body of original lithographs that number among the most important in the history of the modern print. Between 1891 and 1899 he produced thirty-one posters that are the foundation for his reputation as the greatest of all poster artists. His posters epitomize the avant-garde styles of the fin-de-sié cle in their flat forms enlivened by bold color and curvilinear contours.