Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - Dans les coulisses ou La Pierreuse

This work is one of fifteen or so obsessive "takes" of various identities that the model Carmen Gaudin inspired Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to portray.  She appears here, standing in a doorway, as a "pierreuse" - an uncompromising term for a streetwalker - languishing at the very bottom of the social scale. Like his contemporaries, the French artist had taken an interest in the world of brothels, capturing the "everyday" postures of the women who used their charms to eke out a living. With a few brushstrokes applied to a piece of worn cardboard and using a novel framing technique borrowed from photography, he takes us behind the scenes to paint a candid picture of this marginal figure - neither sleazy nor idealised.