HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC (1864-1901)

The present work featured on the cover of Aristide Bruant’s magazine, Le Mirliton, and hung on the wall of his celebrated cabaret of the same name. Five years later, in February 1891, it would be reprinted on the cover of La Plume (fig. 1). In the first volume of his biography of Picasso, John Richardson wrote of the drawing’s effect on the 20-year-old artist’s melancholic blue-period depictions of the women’s prison at Saint-Lazare: “Picasso would have seen [the present work]… it hung on the cabaret walls. Lautrec portrays one of the whores in her syphilitic bonnet writing an abjectly adoring letter... The drawing echoes the wry, sentimental mood of Bruant’s ballad. Here is the last verse of this ballad (prototype of the ballads Edith Piaf would sing fifty years later):

"I end my letter with a kiss
So long, man of mine,
Though you’re not affectionate
Oh, how I adore you like
I used to adore God, and Papa,
When I was a little girl
And used to go to communion
At Saint’-Marguerite” (A Life of Picasso, New York, 1991, vol. 1, p. 218).