Ambassadeurs: Aristide Bruant (1892)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Artist: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
The singer and entertainer Aristide Bruant commissioned Toulouse-Lautrec in 1892 to promote Bruant’s appearances at the upscale café-concert hall, Les Ambassadeurs. The poster of Bruant is among the most recognizable of Lautrec’s images and has come to be emblematic of the Belle Époque era in the popular imagination. Braunt requested Toulouse-Lautrec to market his rough street persona in a manner that would appeal to a bourgeois audience. At Bruant's insistence, "Ambassadeurs: Aristide Bruant" was posted all over the cabaret and the streets of Paris, drawing considerable attention not just to Bruant but also to the young painter who had so accurately and strikingly portrayed him. Seizing on Bruant's trademark costume of a wide-brimmed hat, cape, and red scarf, Lautrec designed a sparse yet iconic image that promoted both the performer's career as well as his own.
Toulouse-Lautrec conveys Braunt’s strong, imposing personality by letting him dominate the picture, exaggerating his centrality to the world of Parisian popular entertainment and obscuring the more irregular and provocative aspects of his public persona. Bruant was famous for wittily insulting and degrading his audiences with the language of the Parisian lower classes to their great amusement, while Lautrec was the only patron consistently treated with respect.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker and illustrator who established himself as the premier poster artist in Paris in the 1890’s and was often commissioned to advertise famous Montmartre entertainers as celebrities. An aristocratic, alcoholic dwarf known for his louche lifestyle and immersion in the nightlife culture, Lautrec portrayed the colourful, theatrical and sometimes decadent Parisian life of his days. Elevating the medium of lithography to the realm of high art in the late 19th century, Lautrec – along with Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin – is among the most well-known painters of the Post-Impressionist period.