The Ladies in the Dining Room

Painted in 1894 and now at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, this scene of women in a dining room belongs to the domestic and institutional interior subjects Lautrec explored alongside his more celebrated performance scenes. The setting may be the brothel dining room or a café, a liminal space where the women who inhabited Lautrec's social world ate, rested, and socialised between professional engagements. These quieter domestic scenes complement the theatrical energy of his cabaret works, showing the same subjects in the unglamorous ordinary rhythms of daily life. The Budapest holding reflects the wide international dispersal of Lautrec's work.

The dining room scene is handled with the flat, economical approach of Lautrec's interior paintings — figures in characteristic attitudes at a table, the space described through minimal architectural indication. The figures' faces are observed with his characteristic searching directness, the painting's quiet intimacy contrasting with his theatrical subjects.