Dead at thirty-six
Lautrec did not get old. He died on the ninth of September 1901, aged thirty-six, at his mother’s estate, of the combined toll of alcoholism and syphilis. State it plainly and humanely: a brilliant, hard-living man burned out young, having packed an entire vision of a city’s nightlife into about fifteen working years. He left behind a body of paintings, prints and posters that more or less define how we picture Belle Époque Paris.
The picture’s permanent home
After his death the painting passed through the hands of his friend and champion Maurice Joyant and then a chain of dealers, from Paris to London to the United States. In 1928 the Chicago collector Frederick Clay Bartlett gave it to the Art Institute of Chicago, as part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, named for his late wife. It has been a cornerstone of the museum’s Post-Impressionist holdings ever since.
The night, from the inside
It is now one of the most reproduced images of fin-de-siècle Paris, and for good reason. It is not a tourist’s idea of the Moulin Rouge but an insider’s, a group portrait of named regulars under the real, unflattering electric light, framed like a glance rather than a pose, with the painter himself slipped into the back of the room. It took the most modern subject available, the artificial-lit city at midnight, and treated it with the seriousness art had saved for far grander things, which is exactly the Post-Impressionist bet: that the real, contemporary, ordinary world, seen clearly, was the great subject after all.