Fastening a Corset
Medium
Lithograph printed in five colors on wove paper
Dimensions
20-7/16 x 15-3/4 in. (51.9 x 40.0 cm)
Classification
Prints
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Bequest of Scofield Thayer, 1982
Accession Number
1984.1203.166(11)
Tags
Art Historical Context
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's *Fastening a Corset* (1896) captures an intimate moment of daily life in fin-de-siècle Paris, a city buzzing with the energy of the Belle Époque. The Post-Impressionist artist, renowned for his vivid depictions of Montmartre's bohemian nightlife, cabarets, and demimonde, here focuses on a man assisting a woman with her corset—a garment emblematic of late 19th-century fashion's rigid ideals of femininity. Lautrec's unflinching gaze reveals the sensual undercurrents of ordinary routines, blending tenderness with subtle eroticism in a scene that humanizes his subjects ...
About the Artist
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1864–1901
Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Montfa (1864-1901) was a French Post-Impressionist painter, printmaker, and illustrator whose innovative poster designs revolutionized graphic art and advertising in late 19th-century Paris. Born into an aristocratic family at Albi in southern France, Toulouse-Lautrec's privileged lineage traced back to the Counts of Toulouse and extended uninterrupted to th...