Artwork · 19th century · Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

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At the Moulin Rouge

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec1892–95Oil on canvas123 × 141 cm

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At a glance

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A crowd of regulars, dancers, and a singer gathered around a table at the Moulin Rouge, a Paris nightclub.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted it between 1892 and 1895.
Almost everyone in it is a real, named person from the artist's circle, and the artist slipped himself into the crowd too.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Look at the far right edge. A woman's face pushes into the scene as if from outside the frame, and it glows an acid green. This is the singer May Milton. White patches around the eyes and bright red lips make her look lit by a harsh electric light.
Zoom into the top center. A tall man in a top hat walks beside a short, bearded man in a bowler. The short man is Toulouse-Lautrec himself. The tall one is his cousin, the doctor Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran, and the painter did nothing to hide the difference in their height.
Move to the back, upper right. A woman with her back to us lifts both arms to fix her orange hair. She is La Goulue, a star dancer of the club. We never see her face, only a bare back and raised elbows.
Zoom into the table on the left. A glass carafe and a tall glass stand on a white cloth. The glass is just a few thin greenish lines, yet you can see right through it. The cloth still shows rough, open brushstrokes.
Now the wide brown band at the lower left. A railing cuts across the canvas at a steep angle and blocks our way in. Faint balusters show between its rails. We are standing where another customer would stand, looking at the group from the other side of the barrier.

When it was painted

In 1892 Toulouse-Lautrec was twenty-eight. He came from an old noble family in the south of France. As a teenager he broke one thighbone and then the other, a year apart, and his legs stopped growing. By now he lived in Montmartre in Paris and spent his nights drawing in its cabarets and dance halls.

The Moulin Rouge opened in 1889, and he quickly became a regular. He even had a table kept for him. The club's owner bought his circus picture Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando) and hung it in the lobby. In 1891 his big poster for the Moulin Rouge went up on walls all over Paris, and his name went with it.

This canvas is a group portrait of that late-night crowd. At the table sit the dancers Jane Avril and La Macarona, the photographer Paul Sescau, the poet Édouard Dujardin, and the wine merchant Maurice Guibert. These were his friends and drinking companions, not hired models.

The painting has a scar. At some point the section with May Milton on the right was cut away. By 1914 it had been joined back on, and no one knows for certain who cut it or why. The Art Institute of Chicago acquired the work in 1928.

La Goulue left the Moulin Rouge in 1895 and set up her own booth at a fairground. Toulouse-Lautrec painted two large panels to decorate its front. He died in 1901, at thirty-six.

Look again at the small gentleman beside his tall cousin. The painter placed himself in a corner of this noisy night, as just one more customer passing through.

The painter

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

1864–1901

All paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec →

More by the same painter

The Englishman (William Tom Warrener, 1861–1934) at the Moulin Rouge1892

At the Circus: The Spanish Walk (Au Cirque: Le Pas espagnol)1899

Hidden stories in this painting

Why is the face at the edge of At the Moulin Rouge green?Toulouse-Lautrec let one woman's face hang off the right edge of his nightclub scene, and he painted it a startling acid green.

Questions to think about

Look for itHow many men in top hats can you count in the painting?
Why?Why do you think Toulouse-Lautrec painted May Milton's face green?
What about you?He painted heights and faces exactly as they were, including his own. Now that we smooth our photos with filters before posting them, what does it mean to show a face as it really is?

Same period