Salon des Cent - Lautrec

Summer, 1895. Lautrec and fellow artist Maurice Guibert are on board the steamer Le Chili, en route along the Atlantic coast from Le Havre to Bordeaux. Lautrec cannot keep his eyes off the young woman berthed in cabin No. 54. She’s meeting her husband in Senegal. Lautrec, suddenly obsessed, ignoring pleas from Guibert, refuses to get off the boat at Bordeaux. Finally, he is persuaded off the boat at Lisbon. But not before he's captured a photograph of the unknown woman, which he turned into a lithograph of the exact same pose, "exquisite both in its execution and in the remoteness of the subject's personality". The Art Nouveau masterpiece was used to promote Salon des Cent ("Salon of the One Hundred") - a commercial art exhibition in Paris. The Salon sold colour posters, prints and reproductions of artwork to the general public at reasonable prices.