A tipped-up room full of real people
The picture is roughly 4 feet tall and 4 feet 7 inches wide, and the first thing it does is throw you off balance on purpose. A long balustrade (a railing) sweeps in from the lower-left corner on a steep diagonal and drives your eye back into the room toward a table of people. Nothing is centered, nothing is posed; the whole scene is tipped up and cropped as if you had just walked up to the rail. This snapshot framing, off-center, cut at the edges, comes from two sources Lautrec had absorbed: Japanese woodblock prints (the flat, boldly cropped color prints that flooded into Europe after trade with Japan opened in the 1850s, which his whole generation pored over) and the older painter Degas, who had already made the tipped-up floor and the figure sliced by the frame his own.
Naming the table
These are specific, nameable people. Around the central table sit the writer Édouard Dujardin, the dancer La Macarona, the photographers Paul Sescau and Maurice Guibert, and, seen from behind with a burst of flaming orange-red hair, the dancer and entertainer Jane Avril, the visual anchor of the whole canvas. Crossing the back of the room, a short top-hatted figure walks just in front of a conspicuously tall one: that is Lautrec himself, tiny, ahead of his much taller cousin, the physician Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran, the height gap played as a dry joke. At the back on the right, fixing her hair in a greenish mirror, is La Goulue ("The Glutton"), the Moulin Rouge’s star can-can dancer. And at the right edge, lunging into the frame, is the face of the English dancer May Milton.
What electric light does to a face
The whole room is lit by the harsh artificial electric light of the venue, and that, more than any choice of palette, is what gives the picture its acid greens and chalky faces. May Milton’s face at the right edge is washed a shocking, poisonous green, lit from below. It looks expressionistic, almost lurid, but it is really honest reporting: this is what the new electric glare actually did to skin at midnight. Lautrec did not invent the color. He just refused to soften it.