Quoted From: Toulouse Lautrec and Carmen Guedin: From Aristocrat to Bohemian Nevertheless, by juxtaposing the model's darkness and the light from the window behind her, Lautrec still shows a degree of ambivalence towards his new life, as if wanting to keep his old life close, like a safety net in case his bohemian lifestyle would lead him to self-destruction.
Edouard bolleau series#
In changing Carmen from angel to devil, Lautrec might subconsciously try to show us how he too was "colored" by the licentious environment of Montmartre, capturing his own decay by darkening his palette throughout this series of paintings.
This change is reflected in the colors of the painting: whereas in Carmen, the golden hair and bright face rendered her as an angel, here the white blouse serves only to enhance her dark hair and countenance, her once halo-like locks now resembling the horns of a devil. Therefore, the angelic, noble Carmen, the laundress- symbol of purity- has transformed into the demonic Rosa, the prostitute.
This entitles us to conclude that the same model sat for both, a hypothesis confirmed by Charles Stuckey in his book Toulouse-Lautrec, Paintings in which he identifies the model as Carmen. Yet by looking at the women in La Blanchisseuse and At Montrouge, Rosa la Rouge, we notice that the resemblance between the two is striking: same features, same dark red hair, same white blouse. Furthermore, Julia Frey claims that Lautrec might have gotten syphilis from a prostitute known on the "butte" as "Rosa la Rouge" about the year 1886, the same year as this painting, although he had been warned of the girl's illness. The intriguing aspect of this painting is that, in speaking about At Montrouge, Rosa la Rouge, Pierre Cabanne refers to the model who sat for it as being not Carmen Gaudin, but Rosa 'La Rouge', "an experienced lover" who helped Toulouse-Lautrec get over another disappointment in love. Here, Gaudin is shown in a white blouse contrasting with her dark red hair and shadowed face. This contrast between the white blouse and dark hair and face, antithetical to the contrast in the first paintings, hints to Lautrec's realizing that his noble descent is being shadowed by the bohemian lifestyle he was starting to indulge in, but perhaps just as Carmen is depicted half lighted, Lautrec wants to regard himself as still partly aristocratic.Įven when bohemia permanently took over Lautrec, as marked by the painting 'At Montrouge, Rosa la Rouge'(1886-1887), the artist still exhibits a significant degree of ambivalence regarding his now fully bohemian lifestyle. Her countenance too, though facing the light, is rendered darker than her hand, which seems to have borrowed some whiteness from the blouse and the cloth on the table, as if the inner light is slowly draining away from her, turning her from source of light to absorber of light. Even the part of her hair that should be illuminated by the window light is now darker, and the rest, in the shadow, is rendered in a dark red-brown hue. Toulouse-Lautrec renders her dressed in a bright, white blouse that seems to emanate light, despite the fact that the true source of light should be the window in the extreme left of the painting. Considered his first masterpiece according to Christie's where it sold for $22,400,000, this painting could suggest his bohemian side slightly taking over his aristocratic side in a palette hinting to his abating feelings of doubt about his bohemian life. The turning point in Toulouse-Lautrec's art, showing which of these callings eventually took over Lautrec, is La Blanchisseuse (1886-1887), as the contrast between Carmen's hair and the background switches from those in the first paintings. In a 2005 auction at Christie's auction house a new record was set when "La blanchisseuse", an early painting of a young laundress, sold for $22.4 million U.S. Toulouse-Lautrec is known along with Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin as one of the greatest painters of the Post-Impressionist period.
Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 - 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colorful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times.
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