Monsieur Boileau at the Café
Medium
oil and tempera with charcoal on millboard
Dimensions
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Classification
Drawing
Department
Drawings
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection
Accession Number
1925.1409
Tags
About this artwork
Cleveland’s 1925 purchase of this work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec marked the first acquisition of one of the artist’s drawings by a museum in the United States. Its subject, Monsieur Boileau, was a gossip columnist known to drink heavily at Le Mirliton, a nightclub. Here, saturated, acidic tones evoke the room’s gas lamps and thinned oil paint absorbs into its support, producing texture that complements the scene’s grittiness. In his own time, Toulouse-Lautrec was considered a portraitist for ...