The piece that was sliced off

There is something faintly wrong with the right side of this painting, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. The composition feels lopsided on the right, as if a chunk is missing. A chunk was missing. At some point an L-shaped strip was cut from the bottom and right of the canvas, and that strip contained the green-lit face of May Milton lunging in at the edge, along with part of the foreground.

The strip was later reattached, and by 1914 the canvas had been put back to the full extent you see today. The honest gap in the record is the why and the who: nobody has established who cut it down or for what reason. A common guess is that it was trimmed to make the picture easier to sell, by Lautrec or a dealer, but that is a guess, not a documented fact. The right way to say it is the plain way: for reasons that are not known, the canvas was cut down and then, by 1914, rejoined. The slightly off-balance crop on the right is the scar of that surgery.

It is a useful thing to notice, because the off-center edge is also exactly the kind of cropped, unbalanced framing Lautrec liked on purpose, which is partly why the damage went unremarked for so long. The cut accident and the deliberate Japanese-print crop happen to pull in the same direction.