Monsieur Fourcade

We have great news for you—for the next four weeks on Sundays we will be presenting masterpieces created by one of my favorite artists, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. You have only until October 1st to visit the Museu de Arte de São Paulo exhibition, Toulouse-Lautrec in Red; so if you would like to visit it you should be quick :)

If you can't afford to go to Brazil (like us) you can always open the DailyArt app each Sunday. ;)

Exposed in the Salon des Indépendents of 1899, this is an iconic work of Toulouse-Lautrec, belonging to the MASP collection. In the painting, we see the banker Henri Fourcade in a gala dress at a masquerade. His black figure in the center of the picture, walking with his hands in his pockets towards the viewer, is framed by a background punctuated by several colorful characters with marked traits that give a surprising dynamism to the composition. There are five women wearing costumes in the scene: on the left, two of them are talking; in the background, another wears striped clothes; to the right, in the foreground, a woman in green dress walks in the opposite direction to Fourcade. Between the two, we see a red hooded silhouette talking to another typical bourgeois: the cartoonish figure of Gabriel Tapié de Celeyran (1869–1930), a friend and cousin of Toulouse-Lautrec, who accompanied the artist for most of his life.