Tête de lady anglaise

In addition to the paintings, prints, and posters chronicling the variety of entertainments that fin-de-siècle Montmartre offered its inhabitants, with its circus, cabarets, cafés and brothels, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec is recognized as a master of portraiture. 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, whether in oil, works on paper or prints, portraits dominate Lautrec's oeuvre, with some forty percent of his artistic output falling into this category. Anne Roquebert has noted that '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' (exh. cat., Toulouse-Lautrec, Hayward Gallery, London, 1991, 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., Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre, Washington D.C., 2005, p. 70).

Tête de Lady anglaise dates from 1898 and was most likely executed during Lautrec's trip to London for the aforementioned exhibition at the Goupil Gallery, which was the largest exhibition of the artist's work to be held during his lifetime. Dortu records two further pictures with definitively English subjects executed in this year, Soldat anglais fumant sa pipe (Dortu no. P.666; Musée d'Albi) and Bar-Maid (Dortu P. 671; Private collection).