Gueule de bois

A young woman sits alone in a Montmartre club, a glass and a bottle before her, her gaze somewhere far away. Toulouse-Lautrec painted her just before his own success, and the model was the future painter Suzanne Valadon.

The story behind the painting

The Hangover, also called The Drinker, was painted in the late 1880s. Its model, Suzanne Valadon, had begun posing for artists after falling from a circus trapeze at 15. Lautrec hired her on the advice of his friend Federico Zandomeneghi, and the two mingled at Le Mirliton, the cabaret Aristide Bruant opened in 1885. Lautrec was the first to buy her art and suggested she change her name from Marie to Suzanne. She went on to become the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

What to look for

Look at the loose, broken brushwork: Wikipedia notes it recalls both the colour theory of Neo-Impressionism and the technique of Lautrec's art school friend Vincent van Gogh. The woman sits alone, a glass in front of her, in a club of the kind where Lautrec and Valadon spent their nights. The canvas measures about 47 by 55 cm. Several preparatory studies came first, followed by a drawing in ink and chalk published in Le Courrier français in 1889.

Meaning and intent

The theme of women drinking alone in cafes runs through Bruant's songs about poor working women, and Lautrec painted it in other works such as Waiting and A la Bastille. Whether this picture was based on a specific song, or titled by Bruant, is debated: the historian Gale B. Murray thinks it had no direct link to any lyric, though its mood matched the songs. The subject also touched Lautrec himself, who drank heavily to cope with the pain of his disability and died at 36.

Legacy

The painting hung permanently at Le Mirliton in the late 1880s and early 1890s, as one of ten works shown at Bruant's club. It reached the United States at the Armory Show in 1913 and is now in the Fogg Museum at Harvard, while the study and the drawing are in the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec. It is one of several works by Lautrec featuring Valadon, alongside Rice Powder in the Van Gogh Museum. Wikipedia dates it to the late 1880s, Wikidata to 1889.