Mujer con sombrilla

A woman sits in a garden in her finest hat, holding a parasol, posing patiently for what she hoped would be the best portrait of her life. Toulouse-Lautrec painted her with precision and a touch of gentle irony.

The story behind the painting

The sitter was a Parisian prostitute nicknamed Berthe the Deaf, and the full title is Berthe the Deaf, seated in the garden of Mr Forest. Lautrec painted her in the garden of the Parisian photographer Forest, a friend who let him work there whenever he liked and keep his materials in a shed. There he painted several other works, including Justine Diel in the Forest garden. The French Wikipedia article gives 1899 in its opening line but 1889 in its description, and Wikidata gives 1889.

What to look for

An unknown photographer captured the artist, the model and the canvas together, and the photo shows how exactly Lautrec rendered every detail: the objects, the clothes, the hat, the pose and the expression, despite the somewhat awkward pose. The photo also shows the shed where he kept his materials. The Hermitage curator Kostenevich described Berthe dressed as if for a ceremonial portrait, with an expensive two-tone hat of fine straw, a parasol and a dress trimmed with lace. The canvas is about 77 by 58 cm.

Meaning and intent

Kostenevich wrote that Berthe was posing openly and patiently for a portrait that should become the best of her life. She clearly wanted to look like a society lady, and nearly succeeded, but the artist could not resist an irony that was not malicious, rather sympathetic. That mix of care and wit is the heart of the picture: a woman from the margins of Paris given her own formal portrait, painted as carefully as any lady's.

Legacy

The painting was first shown in Brussels in January 1890, then passed through the dealer Paul Rosenberg to the German collector Otto Krebs. During the Second World War it was taken by Soviet troops as war reparations and kept for decades in the Hermitage storerooms, first shown in 1995 in an exhibition on art displaced by the war. It has been on permanent display since 2001. The garden itself is gone, a cinema was built in its place. In 1890 Lautrec painted Berthe again in Woman with a Black Hat.