Anklet

This portrait of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s friend the studio photographer Paul Sescau is one of several similar paintings Lautrec made of men in his social circle. Sescau is dressed like a modern boulevardier, or fashionable man-about-town, in a jacket, crisp white collar, and top hat, leaning jauntily on a cane in a corner of the artist’s studio, with canvases stacked on the floor around him. On the wall hangs a Japanese scroll painting (kakemono) that attests to Lautrec’s interest in Japanese art and brings the imagined space of its depicted landscape into the ordinary space of a Parisian studio. The scroll, like the top hat and cane, emphasizes the elegant verticality of the composition, which Lautrec accentuated further by adding a strip of cardboard at the bottom.

When Sescau sold this painting to the critic Roger Marx, Lautrec brokered the deal and stated: “I consider it one of my best.”