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Lot Essay
Having previously worked under the tutelage of René Princeteau and Léon Bonnat, Lautrec entered the atelier of Fernand Cormon in the autumn of 1882, where he worked until 1887. Cormon specialized in an unusual genre, painting scenes from prehistory and antiquity based on archeological findings. However, having located his studio in the less academic milieu of Montmartre, Cormon was progressive in other respects, and following the conclusion of his morning classes, he urged his students to take their sketchbooks out into the streets and draw the people they encountered there. Having led a relatively sheltered life on the provincial estate of his aristocratic family, Lautrec was drawn to bustle of the streets and the people who eked out marginal livings in lowly occupations. Older, more experienced friends and fellow students, such as Albert Grenier and Henri Rachou, introduced him to the seamy pleasures of the demi-monde. In 1886, around the time the present drawing was done, Lautrec signaled his commitment to a bohemian Montmartre life-style by renting rooms with a studio at 27 (now 21), rue Caulaincourt, where he stayed until 1898.
Lautrec was attracted to red-haired women, and when in the fall of 1885 he and Rachou encountered a young working woman with coppery hair outside a Montmartre restaurant, Lautrec insisted that Rachou persuade her to become his model. She was Carmen Gaudin, who, as Carmen la rousse, became Lautrec's favorite model for the next several years. She was probably a laundrymaid and likely worked as a prostitute on the side. Lautrec hoped to elevate her status by painting her. Carmen was Lautrec's model for a number of portraits, including Dortu nos. P.243-P.247, P.306 and P.317, and a final sequence of sittings ending in 1889, Dortu nos. P.342-345, and P.352-P.353. She made her most striking and memorable appearance, however, as the model for La blanchisseuse (fig. 1).
The subject of the present drawing is a laundress; rolling her sleeves up for work, she carries a wine bottle at her side that she would fill with water to steam the clothes as she ironed them. Bottles used for this purpose likewise appear in two late examples of Edgar Degas' laundress series, titled Les repasseuses, (Lemoisne nos. 686-687 and 785), which were painted in 1884-1887, according to the 1988 retrospective catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Lautrec depicted a young working woman holding a corked wine bottle while crossing the street in Jeune fillet tenant une bouteille de vin, (Dortu D.2.928), circa 1885-1886, which the artist intended as an illustration of street-life for the newspaper Courrier Français. She, too, is probably a laundress, carrying a tool of her trade to or from work. Ironically, if such bottles were a symbol of washerwomen's oppressive, backbreaking work, it was also one of their few sources of relief, that is, when filled with wine. Joris-Karl Huysmans, in his early, naturalistic Croquis parisiens (published in 1880), described the life of a laundress: "Oh yes, the young ones flirt, mad for love, and have a right old time on leaving the washhouse! Do you think their lives are easy and that they haven't the right to bury the dreariness of a long day in the bottom of a winebottle or a bed? Oh, how they love and how they drink!" (translated by Brendan King, in J.-K. Huysmans, Parisian Sketches, Sawtry, Cambridgeshire, 2004, p. 77).
Although the model of the present drawing is not easily identifiable from her profile alone, circumstantial evidence points to her being Carmen Gaudin, seen here with her characteristic unruly fringe pinned back for work. Indeed, her reddish hair may have inspired Lautrec in his choice of using sanguine chalk for this impromptu but deeply sensitive and accomplished study. Lautrec eventually lost interest in Carmen after 1889, partly because of his contacts with other women, but as Lautrec told it, for the reason that she stopped dyeing her hair, so that it no longer possessed its sensuous russet tone. "Now a conventional brown, she had as, Henri put it, 'lost her appeal'" (D. Sweetman, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Fin-de-Siècle, London, 1999, p. 144).
(fig. 1) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La blanchisseuse, 1886-1887; sold Christie's, New York, 1 November 2005, lot 17 (sold $22,416,000).
Lautrec was attracted to red-haired women, and when in the fall of 1885 he and Rachou encountered a young working woman with coppery hair outside a Montmartre restaurant, Lautrec insisted that Rachou persuade her to become his model. She was Carmen Gaudin, who, as Carmen la rousse, became Lautrec's favorite model for the next several years. She was probably a laundrymaid and likely worked as a prostitute on the side. Lautrec hoped to elevate her status by painting her. Carmen was Lautrec's model for a number of portraits, including Dortu nos. P.243-P.247, P.306 and P.317, and a final sequence of sittings ending in 1889, Dortu nos. P.342-345, and P.352-P.353. She made her most striking and memorable appearance, however, as the model for La blanchisseuse (fig. 1).
The subject of the present drawing is a laundress; rolling her sleeves up for work, she carries a wine bottle at her side that she would fill with water to steam the clothes as she ironed them. Bottles used for this purpose likewise appear in two late examples of Edgar Degas' laundress series, titled Les repasseuses, (Lemoisne nos. 686-687 and 785), which were painted in 1884-1887, according to the 1988 retrospective catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Lautrec depicted a young working woman holding a corked wine bottle while crossing the street in Jeune fillet tenant une bouteille de vin, (Dortu D.2.928), circa 1885-1886, which the artist intended as an illustration of street-life for the newspaper Courrier Français. She, too, is probably a laundress, carrying a tool of her trade to or from work. Ironically, if such bottles were a symbol of washerwomen's oppressive, backbreaking work, it was also one of their few sources of relief, that is, when filled with wine. Joris-Karl Huysmans, in his early, naturalistic Croquis parisiens (published in 1880), described the life of a laundress: "Oh yes, the young ones flirt, mad for love, and have a right old time on leaving the washhouse! Do you think their lives are easy and that they haven't the right to bury the dreariness of a long day in the bottom of a winebottle or a bed? Oh, how they love and how they drink!" (translated by Brendan King, in J.-K. Huysmans, Parisian Sketches, Sawtry, Cambridgeshire, 2004, p. 77).
Although the model of the present drawing is not easily identifiable from her profile alone, circumstantial evidence points to her being Carmen Gaudin, seen here with her characteristic unruly fringe pinned back for work. Indeed, her reddish hair may have inspired Lautrec in his choice of using sanguine chalk for this impromptu but deeply sensitive and accomplished study. Lautrec eventually lost interest in Carmen after 1889, partly because of his contacts with other women, but as Lautrec told it, for the reason that she stopped dyeing her hair, so that it no longer possessed its sensuous russet tone. "Now a conventional brown, she had as, Henri put it, 'lost her appeal'" (D. Sweetman, Toulouse-Lautrec and the Fin-de-Siècle, London, 1999, p. 144).
(fig. 1) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La blanchisseuse, 1886-1887; sold Christie's, New York, 1 November 2005, lot 17 (sold $22,416,000).