Monsieur Boileau at the Café1893
Cleveland’s 1925 purchase of this work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec marked the first acquisition of one of the artist’s drawings by a museum in the United States. More about this work
About this work
Cleveland’s 1925 purchase of this work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec marked the first acquisition of one of the artist’s drawings by a museum in the United States. Its subject, Monsieur Boileau, was a gossip columnist known to drink heavily at Le Mirliton, a nightclub. Here, saturated, acidic tones evoke the room’s gas lamps and thinned oil paint absorbs into its support, producing texture that complements the scene’s grittiness. In his own time, Toulouse-Lautrec was considered a portraitist for such depictions of friends and other inhabitants of his neighborhood. He preferred drawing for its immediacy, using it to record his sitters’ personalities through materials and formal choices.
Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art.
How it was made
- Tempera
- Pigment bound with egg yolk. It dries in minutes and can’t be blended wet, so painters built up form with fine, hatched strokes. It was Europe’s main panel technique before oil.
- Oil paint
- Pigment ground in a drying oil, usually linseed. It dries slowly, so painters could blend on the canvas, build up thin translucent glazes, and rework a picture over weeks. Canvas replaced wooden panels in the 1500s because it is lighter and can be rolled.
- Charcoal
- Burnt willow or vine. It smudges and wipes away easily, which made it the natural tool for working out a composition.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
French, 1864–1901 · Born in Albi; died in Saint-André-du-Bois.
Toulouse-Lautrec came from an aristocratic family in Albi; after two leg fractures in his teens his legs stopped growing, and he turned to art. Trained in Paris under Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon, he settled in Montmartre and recorded its dance halls, cabarets, circuses and brothels with quick, incisive line. His colour lithograph posters for the Moulin Rouge and its performers transformed the street poster. He died at the family’s Château de Malromé at the age of thirty-six.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Post-Impressionism
Artists who kept Impressionism's colour but pushed towards structure, symbol and feeling.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Cleveland Museum of Art has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 1925.1409
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art
- Type
- Drawing
- Department
- Drawings
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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