Two Women Making the Bed

Painted in 1891, this scene of two women making a bed belongs to the series of domestic and intimate subjects Lautrec was developing in parallel with his cabaret and dance hall paintings. The unmade bed and the physical work of making it were deliberately anti-aesthetic subjects — Courbet and Degas had both shown women in unglamorous domestic labour — and Lautrec's version maintains this tradition of honest social observation. The subject's intimacy and the collaborative domestic work of two women together connects it thematically to his brothel interior series, though this setting is ambiguous.

The domestic scene is rendered with Lautrec's characteristic informality — figures observed in action without posed arrangement, the physical exertion of the task conveyed through natural postures. The white bed linen provides a luminous central mass against which the figures are silhouetted with thin, directional paint.