Monsieur Boileau at the Café

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Oil and tempera with charcoal on millboard

Cleveland Museum of Art

In this intimate and psychologically charged work, Toulouse-Lautrec depicts a heavyset man in a bowler hat seated at a café table, a glass of what appears to be absinthe glowing before him and money scattered across the surface—evoking the dissolute pleasures of Montmartre nightlife. The subject, Monsieur Boileau, was a gossip columnist known to frequent Le Mirliton, a celebrated Parisian nightclub, and the work bears a handwritten dedication to him in the upper left corner. Executed in oil and tempera with charcoal on millboard, the composition employs saturated, acidic tones that evoke the harsh glare of gas lamps, while the thinned paint absorbs into its support to produce a gritty, immediate texture. Toulouse-Lautrec, one of the defining chroniclers of fin-de-siècle Paris, was regarded in his own time as a portraitist of the city's bohemian inhabitants, and this work stands as a prime example of his ability to capture personality and atmosphere with economy and precision.