Portrait of Jeanne Wenz
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
80.7 × 59.5 cm (32 × 23 1/4 in.); Framed: 106.7 × 86.4 cm (42 × 34 in.)
Classification
painting
Department
Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
42949
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted this portrait when he was only 22 years old and still an art student. He used subtle coloring with accents of pink and green and showed his subject, Jeanne Wenz, in full profile, a compositional device often found in Renaissance portraiture. Wenz was the mistress of Frederic Wenz, Toulouse-Lautrec’s fellow student at the painter Fernand Cormon’s studio. She was also the friend of Suzanne Valadon, an artist in her own right and a frequent sitter for Toulouse-Laut...
About the Artist
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1864–1901
Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa (1864-1901) was a French Post-Impressionist painter, printmaker, and illustrator whose innovative poster designs revolutionized graphic art and advertising in late 19th-century Paris. Born into an aristocratic family at Albi in southern France, Toulouse-Lautrec's privileged lineage traced back to the Counts of Toulouse and extended uninterrupted to th...