Portrait de Henri Nocq

*This lot may be exempt from sales tax as set forth in the Sales Tax
Notice in the back of the catalogue.

Although Toulouse-Lautrec is justly celebrated for his paintings, prints, and posters chronicling the myriad entertainments of fin-de-siècle Montmartre, from the circus and the café-concert to the dance-hall and the brothel, he was recognized equally by his contemporaries as an impresario of the portrait. His first teacher, Léon Bonnat, was best known as a portrait painter, and Lautrec himself described his important one-man exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in London in 1898 as "Portraits and Other Works". Indeed, portraits--whether painted, drawn, or printed--dominate Lautrec's oeuvre, with some forty percent of his artistic output falling into this category (in exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1991, p. 133). Anne Roquebert has written, "Lautrec displayed the same skills in his portraits as he did in his scenes from everyday life: an exceptional capacity to capture the essential nature of his models, to portray them naturally, and an ability continually to bring something new to his compositions" (ibid., pp. 136-137). Richard Thomson, likewise, has asserted, "[Lautrec's] shrewd psychological analyses of the denizens of Montmartre, and his intricate, humorous, and ambiguous ways of weaving them into the discourse of the day, remain remarkable social and artistic documents" (in exh. cat., op. cit. , Washington, D.C., 2005, p. 70).

The subject of the present portrait, Henri Nocq, was a Belgian artist and craftsman, known especially for his jewelry and engraved medals. He and Lautrec were acquainted by 1896, when Lautrec wrote to him about his theories on art: "We could summarize the following desideratum: Fewer artists and more good workers. In a word: more craft" (quoted in ibid., p. 273). In the same year, Nocq published a book of interviews on the applied arts, to which Lautrec contributed a letter admiring the work of William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement in England in the 1860s, and Jules Chéret, one of the most famous Parisian poster designers of Lautrec's day. Nocq also appeared in an 1896 poster by Lautrec entitled L'artisan moderne, a parody of rococo images of the doctor's visit which depicts Nocq--identified as a craftsman by his worker's smock, hammer, and tool kit--visiting a bedridden woman to cure her of lovesickness (Wittrock, no. P24a; fig. 1). Both Nocq and Lautrec portrayed the Montmartrois café-concert star Yvette Guilbert, Nocq in a polychrome ceramic medallion dated 1893, Lautrec in two celebrated albums of lithographs from 1894 and 1898 (Wittrock, nos. 69-85, 271-279), as well as numerous gouaches and drawings.

Painted in 1897 in Lautrec's studio at 27 rue Caulaincourt, Portrait de Henri Nocq is the last in an important series of standing male portraits that the artist made over the course of his career. The paintings all depict well-to-do bourgeois men, frequently Lautrec's own friends; in contrast, the women whom Lautrec painted were usually young, working-class, and often demimondaine. The men are represented in a full-length format indebted to Whistler, Forain, Manet, and Degas (e.g; fig. 2). They wear elegant garb (in the case of Nocq, a formal black cape and top hat) and exude the nonchalant, self-assured demeanor of the urban dandy. Richard Thomson has written, "In all these portraits Lautrec's friends read as individuals when one knows their names and as types if not. Each one could stand for the boulevardier: masculine, prosperous, sexually independent, attuned to the modern world" (ibid., p. 68). Elsewhere, Thomson has explained, "Almost inevitably his male figures are represented as men of the world Portraits such as those of Dr. Bourges, Paul Sescau, Louis Pascal, and Gaston Bonnefoy, despite showing the men in Lautrec's studio, firmly imply, by overcoats, top-hats and open doors, that these men belong in the outside world. Their canes and costumes, their confident postures, and purposeful expressions, present them as cocksure, confident of their class positions; they have something of the swagger of the cavaliers of Meissonier, an artist proud of his aggressively masculine imagery and for whom Lautrec apparently had some respect" (in exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1991, p. 16).

The earliest in the series of standing male portraits dates to 1886-1887 and depicts François Gauzi, a painter whom Lautrec had met in the studio of Fernand Cormon at the école des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse (Dortu, no. P.297; Musée des Augustins, Toulouse). In 1891, Lautrec explored the type in earnest, producing a group of at least five standing male portraits, three of which he included in the Salon des Indépendants that year. The 1891 paintings depict the poet Georges-Henri Manuel (Dortu, no. P.377; Bührle Foundation, Zurich), the photographer Paul Sescau (Dortu, no. P.383; fig. 3), and three of Lautrec's closest childhood friends: Henri Bourges (Dortu, no. P.376; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh), Gaston Bonnefoy (Dortu, no. P.410; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), and Louis Pascal (Dortu, no. P.467; fig. 4). When the Sescau portrait was exhibited at the Salon des Arts Libéraux in June of 1891, Félix Fénéon remarked in his review, "M. de Toulouse-Lautrec elucidates the physiognomy of the old damards [dandies]" (quoted in ibid., p. 154). After concentrating for several years on personalities from the theater, Lautrec returned to the portrait proper in 1895-1898. In addition to the portrait of Nocq, he painted the critic Tristan Bernard (Dortu, no. P.571; private collection), the artist Maxime Dethomas (Dortu, no. P.628; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and the photographer Paul Leclercq (Dortu, no. P.645; fig. 5), among others. Roquebert has described this group of paintings as "more accomplished and less spontaneous than the early portraits" and has concluded, "These late works betray the hard work that has gone into them" (ibid., p. 137).

The portrait of Nocq is no exception. It depicts the Belgian craftsman standing in Lautrec's studio before a mural-sized canvas from 1895-1896 that depicts the singer and actress Marcelle Lender dancing the final bolero in the farcical operetta Chilpéric (Dortu, no. P.627; fig. 5). Florence Coman has called the Chilpéric painting "the most monumental and important of [Lautrec's] theatrical subjects" (in op. cit., p. xxx), while Mary Weaver Chapin has described it as "a magnificent testimony to his career of painting Parisian celebrities" (in exh. cat., op. cit., Washington, D.C., 2005, p. 142). Lautrec was captivated by Lender's performance in Chilpéric, which he attended every few days during its three-month run. The artist's friend Romain Coolus left an eyewitness account of this obsession: "In the winter [of 1895] he compelled me to accompany him twenty times to the Théâtre des Variétés to attend performances of Chilpéric by Hervé, which had just been revived. The beautiful Marcelle Lender played an important role, and she was dressed, or rather undressed, in such a fashion that every muscle of her back could be scrutinized by opera glasses. A bit tired of hearing the famous chorus for the sixth time, I asked Lautrec the reason he insisted on my regularly accompanying him to hear such obvious gush. 'I come strictly in order to see Lender's back,' he said. 'Look at it carefully; you seldom see anything so magnificent'" (quoted in F. Coman, op. cit., p. xxx). Lender did not reciprocate Lautrec's admiration, however, and reportedly refused the gift of the painting, which remained in the artist's studio until his death.

The inclusion of the Chilpéric canvas in the portrait of Nocq represents a central element in Lautrec's characterization of his sitter. Lautrec depicts Nocq in a pose that explicitly echoes that of the lecherous Don Nervoso at the right of Chilpéric, leaning forward with his hands on his hips and his feet planted wide. Charles Stuckey has proposed that Lautrec intended the similar stances of dancer and dandy to draw a parallel between the poses and costumes of modern life and those of the theater (in exh. cat., op. cit., Chicago, 1979, p. 269), and indeed, the sharply receding wooden floorboards of the room that Nocq occupies may be seen to imitate the tilt of a steeply raked stage. Nocq's stance, however, also lends the painting an inescapably acerbic note. His hunched posture appears awkward and obsequious, and the cape distorts his size, creating an unflattering silhouette. In a study for the painting, by contrast, Nocq is shown in a more elegant pose, standing erect and frontal against a blank wall (Dortu, no. P.638; private collection). Kermit Champa has written about the final version, "Dwarfed by his spreading cape amidst the chaos of Lautrec's atelier, the flâneur pose of dandyism is stripped of its elegant self-confidence and appears artificial, even a little foolish" (in exh. cat., op. cit., New York, 1965, p. 84).

Although he kept it in his possession for at least three decades, Nocq is said to have found the final portrait "merciless" and "spiteful in the extreme" (quoted in P. de Lapparent, op. cit., 1928, p. 37; H. Perruchot, op. cit., 1960, p. 234). Indeed, the painting of Nocq, with its mordant undertones, makes it easy to see why Lautrec's portraits have so often been described in terms of caricature. Thomson has identified a caricatural vision as "one of the central currents of Lautrec's work," citing "his exaggeration of features and gestures, his aversion to the comme il faut, his ironic view of the modern metropolis" (in exh. cat., op. cit., London, 1991, p. 174). Critics in Lautrec's day also commented on the artist's acute vision and acerbic wit. In a review of Lautrec's one-man exhibition at the Galerie Manzi-Joyant in Paris in 1896, for example, Gustave Geffroy wrote, "In Lautrec there is an innate caricatural sense which it would be a shame to restrain, because it is rich in justified revelations of social pretensions and moral defects" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., Washington, D.C., 2005, p. 18).

Portrait de Henri Nocq is not the only portrait by Lautrec to employ the device of a painting-within-a-painting to powerful effect. In 1897, the same year that Nocq posed for him, Lautrec represented the poet Paul Leclercq seated in front of Conquête de passage, a scene of a man watching while a woman fastens her corset (Dortu, no. P.645; fig. 6). Thomson has proposed that the inclusion of this particular painting in the Leclercq portrait was a means of underscoring the heterosexual bond between artist and sitter (in exh. cat., op. cit., Washington, D.C., 2005, p. 68). Likewise, an 1891 pastel depicts the poet Georges-Henri Manuel beside an early portrait by Lautrec of a model named Jeanne (Dortu, no. P.378; sold, Christie's, New York, 6 May 1998, lot 173). Manuel and Jeanne are both shown seated, facing one another in full profile, suggesting a confrontation between two paradigms in the typology of modern Paris, the bourgeois man and the working-class woman (or potential client and commodity).




(fig. 1) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, L'artisan moderne, 1896. Sold, Christie's, New York, 1 May 2007, lot 436. BARCODE 25463637

(fig. 2) Edgar Degas, Portrait sur la scène (Halévy et Boulanger-Cavé l'Opéra), 1879. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. BARCODE 25995442

(fig. 3) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Sescau, 1891. Brooklyn Museum.BARCODE 25995503

(fig. 4) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Louis Pascal, 1891. Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi. BARCODE 25995534

(fig. 5) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Marcelle Lender dansant le pas du bolero dans "Chilpéric", 1895-1896. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. BARCODE 25995527

(fig. 6) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Leclercq, 1897. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. BARCODE 25995510