An Englishman at the Moulin Rouge, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

An Englishman at the Moulin Rouge, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1892)

The coloured lithograph, An Englishman at the Moulin Rouge displays Lautrec’s exceptional talent for caricature. In an interior of exaggerated lines and plane-like patches of colour, two prostitutes are speaking with a man in a top hat, in a frame close to the viewer. The facial expressions and self-confident postures of the women proclaim their experience on the “hunting grounds”. The artist records this crucial moment of night life with elegant economy: the largest patch of colour is the brown tone of the male figure, which is echoed in the colour of the hat of the woman opposite, just like the yellow of the background bar in the colour of the chair in the foreground. Despite the figures’ close proximity and their static posture, it is as if we are viewing a snapshot of a scene in motion.