After H. de Toulouse-Lautrec, Femme qui se Lave, La Toilette, Lithograph, 1890s

Femme qui se Lave - La Toiletteis a color lithograph realized by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec in 1896. cm. 58 x 45,5; matted. Monogrammed in the plate. Good conditions. This specimen belongs to an edition of 1900 ca., whose size is unknown, on Vélin Hollande Van Gelder Zonen. Van Gelder Zonen watermark in the paper. Ref. Wittrock 160; Delteil 184; Adhémar 205 Elles; 1896 is the year of the album "Elles". The series was printed in 100 copies. The title page was also used as a Manifesto. The subject is life in brothels, and Lautrec wants to show that women of pleasure, whom he has known well, especially for two years, are not damned souls, but live like the others. He calls them Elles (they), a pronoun that refers to all women and very little in his drawings of him suggests that they are prostitutes. The women Lautrec frequented cared about him very much. This series of ten lithographs plus the cover constitutes one of the peaks of Lautrec's oeuvre. He had three women pose, Pauline, Baron, and another buxom woman whose name we have no name. The album was not very successful in bookstores, but aroused great interest from other artists, so much so that the following year the painter Truchet entitled Elles the painting he presented at the 1899 Salon, representing a group of women in long dresses gathered together in a room. As often happens, the Elles series was re-evaluated years later due to the "very skilful" technique and the avant-garde way of dealing with the subject.