Posted by Carmen Gaudin was the favourite model of the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901). Toulouse-Lautrec met red-haired Carmen Gaudin in the Montmartre district of Paris in 1884, and she soon became his favourite model.
He created fifteen paintings and drawings featuring her.
More than the characters she seems so apt to embody, her person and her wealth of humanity without artifice have obviously fascinated Lautrec for whom contact with life is essential. His painting confirmed this for five years: between 1884 and 1889, Carmen obsessed him, to the point that the artist’s eye enveloped him with a kind of photographic gyration that did not yet have an equivalent among experts in the medium.
Like a filmmaker turning around his character to multiply the angles of shooting, Lautrec represents Carmen from the front, from the back, from the profile, head down, capturing the stubborn and fierce expression of the young woman whose flamboyant and untamed hair seduced him. This repeated and insistent appropriation of the image of a model, in that it is systematic, reflects the concern to identify the figures to better assert their singularity and their aesthetic strength.
Carmen Gaudin (1884)
Oil on canvas, 53 x 41 cm
Williamstown, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
The more orthodox and darker oil-painting style, with smoother surface, which can be seen in the portrayal of Lautrec’s models at this time, can be attributed to the influence of Bonnat, Lautrec’s teacher.
Carmen Gaudin, 1885
23.8 x 14.9 cm
Oil on wood
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Carmen la rousse 1885
Musee Toulouse Lautrec
La blanchisseuse
Stamped with artist’s monogram ‘TL’ (lower left)
oil on canvas
36½ x 29½ in. (93 x 75 cm.)
Painted in 1886-1887
Private Collection. In November 2005 the painting set the auction record for the painter’s work, selling to an anonymous buyer for $22.4m (£13m) at Christie’s in New York.
While Joyant ascribed the date of 1888 to La blanchisseuse, and Dortu placed it in the year after that, Charles F. Stuckey and Naomi E. Maurer have convincingly made the case that Lautrec painted this picture in 1886-1887 (in exh. cat., op. cit., Chicago, 1979, pp. 113-114). The artist was probably not yet 23 years of age when he completed La blanchisseuse. It was his finest painting to date, and indeed, it is arguably his first masterwork. There is no prior picture in his oeuvre in which the young painter had so powerfully and dramatically characterized his subject, or expressed his deepening insight into the world around him with such clarity and certainty in his technical means. Projecting himself into the very soul of this young woman, who may have been no older than himself, Lautrec demonstrated a degree of worldly understanding and compassion well beyond his years. Yet there is nothing sentimental or emotionally extraneous in his depiction of her. Here he made a significant statement of what it was like to live and work in the lowermost rungs of Parisian society at that time; he has utterly transformed the particulars of daily life into the universal image of art. For an adequate comparison, using a similar subject, one has to turn to the mature work of an artist no less in stature than Degas.
Lautrec painted La blanchisseuse during the final years of his enrollment in the atelier of Fernand Cormon, which he entered in 1882. Cormon specialized in an unusual genre, of no interest in itself to Lautrec, in which he painted scenes from prehistory and antiquity that he painstakingly researched using the latest archeological findings. Nonetheless, having chosen to locate his studio in the less academic and déclassé milieu of Montmartre, Cormon proved to be a progressive teacher in other respects. At the conclusion of his morning classes, he urged his pupils to take their sketchbooks out into the streets and draw the people of all stations whom they encountered there. Having led a relatively sheltered life on the provincial estate of an aristocratic family, Lautrec was fascinated by the bustle of the streets and the people who eked out marginal livings in lowly occupations. Older, more experienced friends and fellow students, such as Albert Grenier and Henri Rachou, introduced Lautrec to the seamy pleasures of the demi-monde. In 1886, not long before he painted La blanchisseuse, Lautrec signaled his commitment to a bohemian life-style by renting rooms with a studio at 27 (now 21), rue Caulaincourt in Montmartre, where he stayed until 1898.
The model for this painting was Carmen Gaudin, who in fact made her living as a laundress. François Gauzi, writing much later, related a story in which Lautrec and Rachou spotted Carmen as she was leaving a restaurant sometime in mid-1885. Lautrec was irresistibly attracted to red-headed women, and is supposed to have walked right up to her and examined her closely. He exclaimed to Rachou, “what an air of spoiled meat she has” (in F. Gauzi, Lautrec et son temps, Paris, 1954, p. 129), apparently referring to the fact that like many laundrymaids, she probably worked as a part-time prostitute. Lautrec is supposed to have sought to improve her position by making her his model, but it appears that she had already posed for the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, and later worked for Cormon as well. In autumn 1885 Lautrec wrote to his mother that he was “painting a woman whose hair is absolute gold,” a clear reference to Carmen. His model turned out to be not quite the wild creature that he first supposed her to be. David Sweetman has described Carmen as “polite, punctual, discreet and eager to please. In fact this passivity was one of her sadder traits–[Lautrec] eventually discovered that she had a lover, or more likely a pimp that beat her up, though she never deserted him.” (in Toulouse-Lautrec and the Fin-de-Siècle, London, 1999, p. 142).
Lautrec made numerous studies of Carmen in 1885 (Dortu, nos. P. 243-247). She is easily identifiable by her russet hair, with a fringe that extends outward like small curving wings from her forehead, a petite upturned nose, and a squarish face (fig. 1). By the titles of these studies we know her as Carmen, La Rousse (the redhead), and in Dortu, no. P. 247, her occupation was identified as that of a blanchisseuse. The first large painting in which Lautrec featured her initially caused some confusion about her identity; it is titled A Montrouge–Rosa la Rouge, which refers to a gritty street song by the cabaret singer Aristide Bruant, in which the hapless working heroine, like Carmen in real life, gets bloodied in the end:
It’s Rosa I don’t know she comes from
She has red hair, a dog’s head
When she passes they say, here comes ‘Red’
At Montrouge.
When she gets a ‘John’ in the corner
Me, I’m right there not far at all
And the next day the cop finds ‘red’ all right,
At Montrouge.
(quoted in ibid., p. 143)
It was through Carmen’s situation that Lautrec first experienced the hellish underside of lower class life in Montmartre. In her presence the characters of Emile Zola’s 1877 novel L’Assommoir seemed to suddenly spring to life; the very subjects and fictional plots of the Naturalist novels that Lautrec had been reading materialized in all their disturbing reality before his eyes. In 1880 Joris-Karl Husymans published his Croquis parisiennes, in which he described the plight of washerwomen:
Oh yes, they have a bad reputation. Oh yes, the old ones prowl around like bitches scoffing and drinking, raging with thirst from the heat of the stoves. Oh yes, the young ones flirt, mad for love, and have a right old time on leaving the washhouse! And what of it? Do you think their lives are easy and that they haven’t the right to bury the dreariness of a long day in the bottom of a wine bottle or a bed? Oh, how they love and how they drink! Because to work standing up, under a rain constantly falling from washing hanging on lines, to feel the water creep over the hairs of your neck and run slowly down the middle of your back, to breathe steam from the laundry in big gulps, to have your loins burnt by the fire of the furnace, to carry cartloads of sheets over your shoulder, to stagger under the weight of an enormous basket, to walk, to run, never to rest such is their terrible job, their terrible life! (trans. Brendan King, Parisian Sketches, London, 2004, pp. 77-78)
The sadness of this dreary life may be seen in Carmen’s downcast and resigned expression in the painting Tête de femme rousse en caraco blanc, which, like the present painting, was probably done in 1886-1887, although Dortu ascribed it to 1889. Maurer has noted that these later paintings of Carmen are “subdued in color yet more subtle and refined than the somewhat crude, raw pictures of 1885. When Lautrec made his initial foray into the seamy world of the Parisian lower classes, he wanted his subjects to embody all its coarseness and brutality. In the years that followed, however, as his sensibilities changed, he considerably modified the quality of the works he produced after his first contact with the Zolaesque demi-monde. His paintings became increasingly elegant and subtle in mood as he sought to endow even the tawdriest subjects with decorative qualities and make them expressive of his own developing psychological insight” (in op. cit., pp. 113-114).
Lautrec captured and crystallized the very essence of Carmen Gaudin in the present painting. This was the largest of his depictions of her to date, and the most penetrating and personal in its projection of her inner life. Lautrec, with his own diminutive stature, viewed her slightly from below, which emphasizes the bottom-heavy, pyramidal mass of her lower body, which is further anchored by her left hand propped firmly on the table. Her figure then rises within the triangular shape of her white blouse and peaks at her neck and head, giving her an imposing, almost towering presence. Wearily, hunched forward by the weight of her chores, she leans forward into the light, sharply observing someone in the room, or perhaps looking expectantly to a window that opens to the world outside. In that moment she suddenly assumes an almost saint-like aura, and appears unbowed and defiant. While her eyes are hidden from view, we sense her indomitable character from her posture, her powerful hand, rubbed raw from her work, and the firmness of her jaw. Maurer has written,
By the size of the figure and the extreme boldness and simplicity of the geometric composition with its powerful light-dark contrasts, Lautrec has endowed La blanchisseuse with a physical monumentality that intensifies her mood of somber reflection and recalls similar works by Vermeer. Body inclined toward the open window and face gently illuminated by its light, the figure of the laundress expresses a quiet sense of yearning. By abruptly cropping the window with its open view and by curtaining the model’s eyes with her hair, Lautrec implies that her vision is directed not outside but inward. The masked eyes protect her from the prying gaze of the spectator as well, isolating her in introspection and suggesting how mysterious and hidden our real selves are from one another. (ibid., p. 114)
Carmen’s left-leaning pose in La blanchisseuse recalls Degas’ painting Répasseuse à contre-jour, one of a series depicting laundresses ironing that he made in 1873, whose realistic, proletarian subject caused a stir when Degas showed them in the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. Douglas W. Druick and Peter Zeghers have called this Degas Répasseuse “the most economical as well as the noblest of Degas’ early depictions of ironers, with a slightly tragic cast mitigated only by the wonderful effect of light” (in Degas, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988, pp. 223-224). Lautrec was probably aware of this picture, and indeed in his own Blanchisseuse he created a ‘converse’ image of it. The window, table and model are similarly positioned. However, instead of silhouetting his subject against the light, Lautrec spotlights her against the surrounding darkness of the room. While Degas’ model is little more than a dark and anonymous profile, with little detail visible in her figure, Lautrec’s laundress has a strongly individual character. Unlike Degas, who showed the women at work, Lautrec went so far as to dispense with all signs of activity pertinent to Carmen’s occupation, as well as the tools of her trade. He instead proceeded by inference, allowing the title and the dramatic depiction of his subject tell the story in his picture. The novelty of Degas’ subject is less striking now than it was in the late 19th century, and his painting engages us primarily through “its wonderful effects of light.” Lautrec, on the other hand, draws in his viewers, now as then, through the unflinching intensity of his psychological insight, which is far more personal and confrontational than the “slightly tragic cast” of Degas’s painting.
Picasso also featured a laundress ironing in his own Répasseuse, painted near the end of his Blue period in 1904. Picasso was clearly referring to Degas’s paintings on this subject, and while he was a great admirer of Lautrec during his early years in Montmartre, it is perhaps unlikely that he knew Lautrec’s La blanchisseuse. In any case, Picasso’s painting is all about the misery and poverty of living, which he has stylized to such a degree that genuine tragedy has become melodrama. In contrast to both Degas and Picasso, artists who placed other agendas ahead of their engagement with the personality and inner life of their laundress subjects, Lautrec alone directs our attention in his portrait to the fact that this is the story of a real woman, a living, flesh-and-blood person.
Lautrec employed Carmen Gaudin as one of his favorite models into 1889. In the last paintings he made of her he adopted an airier, lighter keyed Impressionist manner, such as in La Rousse au caraco blanc, 1888 (Dortu, no. P.317), Femme rousse en mauve, 1889 (Dortu, no. P. 342) and, finally, Femme rousse assise dans le jardin de M. Forest, 1889 (Dortu, no. P. 343; fig. 6). Lautrec thereafter lost interest in Carmen, partly because of his contacts with other women, but as Lautrec told it, mainly because she stopped dyeing her hair, so that it no longer possessed its magical reddish-gold tone. Now an ordinary, natural brunette, she had, as Lautrec told a friend, “lost her appeal.” But she had initiated Lautrec into a hidden reality that the young painter had known little about, in David Sweetman’s words, “the grey world that lay behind the facade of starched shirts and layered dresses, the world of bourgeois fashion and comfort, whose slaves were the available playthings of the same men who paid so little for their daily luxuries” (op. cit., p. 143). This is the Paris that Lautrec came to know and love best, the nether regions of mixed light and shade, glamour and tawdriness, which would remain his hunting-ground, as well as his playground, for the rest of his life.
A note in Christie’s
“A Montrouge”– Rosa La Rouge, 1886-87
Oil on canvas
Overall: 28 3/8 x 19 1/8 in. (72.1 x 48.6 cm)
Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania, USA
Toulouse-Lautrec sought to show the underbelly of glamorous Parisian society. Here the model Carmen Gaudin poses as the prostitute Rosa La Rouge, a seedy and murderous character popularized by the songs of the cabaret performer Aristide Bruant. This painting once hung in Bruant’s nightclub, Le Mirliton, in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec paints Carmen with flaming red hair covering her face. Her jaw, which juts out, conveys her surly nature.
Red-Headed Woman in the Garden of M. Foret (1887)
Oil on cardboard
28-1/8 x 22-7/8 in. (71.4 x 58.1 cm)
The Norton Simon Foundation
This picture belongs to a small group Toulouse-Lautrec painted outdoors in the garden of a friend during the summer of 1887. Writing to his mother that July, he complained, “The sky is unsettled and is sprinkling us with an unconcern that shows how little feeling the Eternal Father has with regard to outdoor painting.” An irreverent wit, Toulouse-Lautrec is best remembered for his lurid, acidic portrayals of the Parisian demimonde. Here we see a very different side of his production—tender and pensive—capturing the features of his favourite model, Carmen Gaudin. Her flaming hair and pale, sharp features appear again and again in his pictures from the late 1880s.
Carmen Gaudin in the Artist’s Studio (1888)
Oil on canvas
55.9 x 46.7 cm (22 x 18 3/8 in.)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Gaudin wears the white blouse of a laundress and sits before a studio wall covered with angular canvases. Work-roughened fingers laced in her lap, she stares out at the viewer with a withdrawn, even sullen, expression. The life of a professional model was difficult and fraught with social stigma, her employment dependent on whether her look fit an artist’s vision. When Gaudin changed her locks from red to brown, Toulouse-Lautrec no longer hired her.
The Laundress, 1888.
Black and gray wash with white paint, scratched away in places, on gray cardboard prepared with white ground; sheet:
75.9 x 63.1 cm (29 7/8 x 24 13/16 in.).
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund 1952.113
A prolific illustrator, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec made this drawing as an illustration for an article about “Summer in Paris” published in Paris illustré, a magazine popular among the middle classes. Although the article singled out the laundress as a charming object of the male gaze on the city streets, the stooping posture and dark-circled eyes of the figure seen here give her a worn, tired appearance that invites comparison with the workhorse behind her. The drawing’s sharp receding perspective emphasizes the act of street-level spectatorship and a man’s top hat visible in the coach behind the woman alludes to her subservient social and sexual role.
Toulouse-Lautrec made this drawing as an illustration for an article on “Summer in Paris” published in Paris illustré, a magazine popular among the middle classes. Although the article singled out the laundress as a charming object of the male gaze on the streets of the city, the stooping posture and dark-circled eyes of this figure give her a haggard look that invites comparison with the workhorse behind her. The sharp receding perspective emphasizes the act of street-level spectatorship. A man’s top hat visible in the coach behind the woman alludes to her subservient social and sexual role.
La Rousse in a White Blouse
1889
Oil on canvas. 60.5 x 50.3 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
“His painting should not be viewed merely as a chronicle of the anecdotal but as a quest for timeless values, for as Baudelaire had written, the painter of modern life should capture “the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”
In La Rousse in a White Blouse in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, Lautrec depicts Carmen Gaudin, a girl of working-class origin whom he had discovered in the avenue Clichy in 1884 and with whom he had felt immediately fascinated. With her red hair and white skin, which enhanced her helpless and melancholic appearance, she was exactly the type of young woman he was keen to portray, and she therefore became the subject of several painting executed during those years. These include Carmen Gaudin, Carmen the Redhead, Carmen the Redhead with Lowered Head, The Washerwoman, and Carmen, in which the painter immortalised her likeness in a host of poses and costumes in his characteristic repetitive and insistent manner.
Lautrec, who generally shunned the plein air painting of the Impressionists, executed these works in the studio he shared with Henri Rachou on the rue Ganneron. In the painting in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection the studio background is sketched in order to make it go unnoticed and focus all attention on the sitter. Despite the simple pose in which the sitter is rendered, the melancholic atmosphere conveyed by the composition makes it a masterpiece. The technique of slight touches and very spontaneous brushwork is inherited from Impressionism.With this intentionally crude and unfinished execution the artist succeeds in imbuing with poetry an image that is otherwise very real thanks to his acute powers of observation that are evidenced particularly by the hair, which he paints with extreme care — both the wisps of hair that tumble over the girl’s eyes and those that have fallen out of the untidy chignon gathered at the nape of her neck.
As in other paintings featuring the same sitter, Lautrec achieves a new, modern approach to the art of portraiture that goes beyond a mere naturalistic depiction of the subject. By showing her in half profile with her head tilted and her hair hanging over her forehead partially concealing her face, he omits any reference to her identity and makes her an eternal and imperishable embodiment of the human being.”
Paloma Alarcó – Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Boulevard extérieur (à Montrouge – Rosa La Rouge), 1889, Paris, private collection
The depiction of the desolation of the street line while waiting for suitors is “résolument modern/decidedly modern”. The model is Carmen Gaudin, who chooses Toulouse-Lautrec for many roles. She is also especially appreciated for her flaming red hair.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Rousse (La toilette)
En 1889
Huile sur carton
H. 67,0 ; L. 54,0 cm.
Legs de Pierre Goujon, 1914
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
Toulouse-Lautrec left countless images of women captured in their intimacy, including depicted in their toilet. Here, the female figure occupies the center of the composition and imposes itself in close-up, thus offering the representation of a sculptural back to the viewer. The rattan seats arranged around it suggest that the scene takes place in the painter’s studio, rue Caulaincourt.
If, at the time, the theme of the woman in her toilet was often treated in particular by Mary Cassatt or Bonnard, it is above all the naturalistic influence of Degas that is very present in Lautrec’s painting. Thus, the forgetfulness of the academic pose and the rather unusual accelerated perspective in Lautrec, are like an echo of the series of women at their toilet that Degas presented at the 8th and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886. The framing of the scene and the plunging point of view are indisputably reminiscent of the masterful pastels of Degas to which Lautrec devoted great admiration. In the same way as his elder, Lautrec shows women “without their coquetry” as seen “through the keyhole”. However, he differs from Degas by the humanity with which he looks at them and paints them. This
painting has been the subject of various misunderstandings. It has, in fact, since its origin known several titles and its dating has been modified. It is now established that it was made in 1889 and not in 1896, as it appears in the old catalogues. It is surely this work that Lautrec presented under the name of “Rousse” at the Exposition des XX in Brussels in 1890. This title, wanted by the artist, recalls his predilection for red models, which he represented all his life.