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Lot Essay
'As the story is told [Lautrec], Guibert and their friends set off in early August [1895] in high spirits with a case of wine and champagne, on a cargo liner called the Chili, to cruise down the coast from Le Havre to Lisbon...
Aboard the ship, they saw a lovely young woman travelling with her daughter and their poodle, on their way, it was said, to join her husband, a colonial civil servant in Dakar. Henri was enchanted by her beauty, and a...marvellous lithographic poster...survives to document his infatuation. According to Joyant, Henri was so taken with her that Guibert had a hard time getting him to leave the ship at Lisbon. He wanted to follow her to Dakar.
It is not known whether he ever actually spoke to his perhaps unwitting model. The title of the work implies that he did not know her name, and his lithograph shows her from a viewpoint which suggests she may not ever have realised she was being observed...Joyant later called Henri's litho "an exquisite thing, in its tone, its elegance, in its mood of indolence, in the way it conveys the delight of being alive, with eyes idly wandering, on a fine day".' (Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec - A Life, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1994, pp. 413-4.)
Aboard the ship, they saw a lovely young woman travelling with her daughter and their poodle, on their way, it was said, to join her husband, a colonial civil servant in Dakar. Henri was enchanted by her beauty, and a...marvellous lithographic poster...survives to document his infatuation. According to Joyant, Henri was so taken with her that Guibert had a hard time getting him to leave the ship at Lisbon. He wanted to follow her to Dakar.
It is not known whether he ever actually spoke to his perhaps unwitting model. The title of the work implies that he did not know her name, and his lithograph shows her from a viewpoint which suggests she may not ever have realised she was being observed...Joyant later called Henri's litho "an exquisite thing, in its tone, its elegance, in its mood of indolence, in the way it conveys the delight of being alive, with eyes idly wandering, on a fine day".' (Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec - A Life, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1994, pp. 413-4.)