 And welcome to Barnes Takeout. My name is Nancy Eisen. I'm the Gunn Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation. And I'm actually at the foundation today, which is very exciting. I'm in my office, but I'm going to take you to the galleries. And I'm going to show you a painting by an artist who I absolutely love, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the French 19th century painter who was best known for his depictions of Paris nightlife in the late 19th century. Now, what you see before you is a shot of the novel of Room 22. So we're upstairs in the foundation. This is a room where you see a lot of African work. And you also see a very large Cuba's painting from around 1913 by Roger Le Frisnitz, which is about marriage and relationships. I don't know whether Barnes had that in mind when he put the painting we're going to talk about by its side. But that parallel will become clearer as I tell you a little bit more about the work in question. So if you just look towards the door above the chair, you'll see quite a subdued canvas, you know, distinguished by its browns and its reds and its little flecks of white. And it's called Amon Rouge, Rosa La Rouge. So just to sort of roughly translate, in Mont Rouge, which was a part of Paris, Rosa La Rouge, and Rosa La Rouge is a character Rosa de Red. What we have here is Toulouse-Lautrec imagining a character from a song. And let's just look a little more closely at the painting. Now Rosa La Rouge was a character in a song, as I mentioned. And the song was by a very popular singer at the time called Aristides Bruin. Bruin sang in a working class dialect in Paris. And he was very popular in the nightclubs. Sometimes people said that people, you know, visitors went to hear Bruin sing because they wanted to be shocked. He talked about things that people didn't talk about. You know, the tough side of life, the sex trade, people struggling with alcoholism or addiction. The song Amon Rouge, which Rosa La Rouge stars in, really describes her as a prostitute. He lures clients into sort of precarious places so that her pimp can take advantage of them, you know, robbing them. Perhaps even, you know, there's overtones of murder within the song. It's quite sinister. And here, interestingly, we get a feel for that character, not from any kind of enticing dress, but rather from a menacing body language. Lourtheque creates a body that is tense and taut and doesn't even look at us. And if you see this very almost defiant turn of the head, which he describes in a very economic way, if you look at this high resolution picture, you can see how he's using the texture of the canvas. And there's a very drawn quality to the way that Lourtheque paints. He uses a very thin down paint. And he uses it quite sparsely. There isn't any real depth physically to this painting. All the depth is created by the clever placement of color. The other thing that we know with Lourtheque's painting is that he loved a matte surface. He really didn't like his works to have any kind of varnish on them. He didn't like them to shine. And here you see what effect that creates. It really spares us any sense of gloss. This is a roughly hewn work. And that really seems to fit with his choice of subject matter. Now, we know that the model that Lourtheque uses for this work, and indeed for over a dozen others, is a woman called Carmel Gouda. And she was a laundress. So she was something that made her living washing clothes. The blouse she's wearing is quite typical of that line of work. And Lourtheque had seen her when he'd been out dining with a friend, and he was attracted by her red hair. There seemed to be something that he really fixated on. And the works that he makes of her always make a feature of her red hair. In this instance, you see how that red aligns through the hair tie at the back of her head, the color actually in her oven hair. And also, I think most brilliantly, this little flash of red that makes her enough, again, so economic there, Lourtheque really just having this incredible confidence as he paints. Now, funnily enough, after three or so years of painting, Carmen, Lourtheque loses interest. And we know that this is because he writes this actually in a letter to his biographer, close friend of his, Garzi, that she changed her hair from urban to brown. And at this moment, he loses interest entirely. It does seem to be that it's this formal quality that really acts as a magnet to him. And of course, here, I think there is this wonderful sense of it fitting so well with the character from the song. Rosa Lourtheque has not only connotations of her sensuality, but also of the sort of murderous undertones of the song. And unfortunately, Rosa meets a rather sad end in Raun's tale as she's she's eventually murdered by her pimp. Again, Lourtheque did not shy away from the underbelly of Paris. He too, I think, liked to test the boundaries of of taste. And and yet somehow there's a sensitivity there too. He did know people well within the this sort of Bohemian worlds of Paris. He got close to his models. He became friends with his models. So I think it's it's interesting to to wonder about the circumstances in which this picture was made. You know, somebody posing as a character, Lourtheque really fixating on their individual features as something that could tie into that that that fantasy, if you like. And and again, just a fabulous painting in terms of the handling of paint, the confidence it shows us. And just, you know, even in the detail like this window here, just this lovely freedom that you see as he almost sort of, you know, works his brush out against the dryness of the canvas. So next time you're at the Barnes Foundation, be sure to take a look in Room 22. And I hope that like me, you'll develop a very soft spot for Lourtheque. In the meantime, stay well. And I hope to see you soon. Very best. Bye. Bye.