At the Moulin Rouge

A cabaret table at midnight, painted by a man who had his own reserved seat there, with a dancer’s face lunging in at the edge lit a poisonous green.

1. 1
   The green-lit face at the edge

   Far right foreground, a woman’s face lunging into the frame

   A woman’s face crowds in at the right edge, her chin and cheek washed a lurid, unnatural acid green by the cabaret’s electric light from below. This is the English dancer May Milton, and the shocking color is not symbolism, it is honest reporting of what artificial light does to skin. The way she is cut off by the frame, mid-lunge, is the most modern thing in the picture.
2. 2
   The burst of orange hair

   Center, above the dark table group, seen from behind

   Rising over the dark-clad people at the table is a head of flaming red-orange hair, seen from behind. It belongs to the dancer and entertainer Jane Avril, and it is the visual anchor of the whole canvas, the one hot note your eye keeps returning to in a scene of murky greens and browns.
3. 3
   The painter, tiny, in the back

   Background, a short top-hatted figure beside a very tall one

   Crossing the back of the room is a short man in a top hat walking just ahead of a conspicuously tall companion. The short one is Lautrec himself, the tall one his cousin, the physician Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran. Lautrec puts himself in his own painting as a small background figure and makes the height gap part of the joke, a dry, unsentimental self-insertion.
4. 4
   La Goulue at the mirror

   Back right, a woman fixing her hair, reflected in glass

   At the back on the right a woman arranges her hair, half-caught in a greenish mirror. She is La Goulue ("The Glutton"), the Moulin Rouge’s famous can-can star, shown not mid-performance but in an offhand, backstage moment, fixing herself up like anyone else.
5. 5
   The diagonal that pitches you in

   Lower left, a long balustrade sweeping back into the room

   A long railing cuts in from the lower-left corner on a steep diagonal and drives your eye back to the table. This tipped-up, cropped, off-center framing comes straight from Japanese woodblock prints, and it throws you into the room as if you had just walked up to the rail yourself, rather than looking at a tidy, posed picture.
6. 6
   The off-balance right edge

   The right side, where the canvas feels oddly cut

   The right edge feels slightly wrong, lopsided, as if part of the composition is missing. It is: an L-shaped strip was cut from the canvas at some point (taking May Milton’s green face with it) and reattached by 1914. Who cut it, and why, is not known. The faint seam and the off-kilter crop are the record of that lost-and-recovered piece.
7. 7
   The monogram, lower left

   Lower left corner, a small interlocked mark

   Down in the lower-left corner is Lautrec’s monogram, his initials stamped together in a small interlocked mark, the period’s version of a signature.