Artist: Toulouse-Lautrec French (1864-1901)
Title: Divan Japonais
Plate: PL. 2
Original lithograph from "Les Maitres de L'Affiche" series.
Printed by Imprimerie Chaix, Paris, 1896.
Reference: Wittrock, P11; Adriani, 8; DFP-II, 824; Maitres, 2; Wagner, 3; Modern Poster, 5; Wine Spectator, 42; Posters of Paris, 92; Lautrec/Montmartre, 164; Reims, 780; PAI-LXXXII, 462
Presented in 16 x 20 in. acid free, archival museum mat.
Ready to frame. Shipped boxed flat.
Certificate of Authenticity.
Maitre Sheet Size: 11 3/8 in x 15 3/4 in 29 cm x 40 cm
Price: $3400.00
Full size sold $69,000 USD Poster Auctions International, NY. May 2005
“I owe him the fame that I enjoyed, dating from his first poster of me.” Jane Avril
"Of all the female entertainers Lautrec celebrated in his posters, Jane Avril and Yvette Guilbert were the two with whom he maintained the longest friendship. He portrayed them both together in one of his most brillant posters, Divan Japonais… Although Guilbert was the performer at this rather shabby cabaret when it opened in the spring of (1893), Lautrec made the half-Italian Avril the local figure in his composition. Under a shock of red-orange hair topped with a pagoda-shaped hat and towering plume, her black, silhouetted figure dominates the frontal plane as she nor her companion, Edouard Dujardin, the distinguished founder of the Symbolist Revue Wagnerienne, deign to look at Guilbert on stage, whom Lautrec portrayed as 'headless', probably as a witty response to her complaint that he caricatured her and made her ugly" (Wagner, p.21)
Concerts du Divan Japonais, Rue des Matyrs, Paris.
Pictured at the Divan Japonais café concert, Jane Avril “appears to be almost smiling, as if the whole thing were an inside joke. Jane is accompanied—or, more likely, being accosted—by noted critic Edouard Dujardin, no doubt with amorous intentions, but Avril's faintly bemused expression indicates that she is used to this, and will be able to handle him without any trouble. Note that the performer—although it is a great celebrity, the famous Yvette Guilbert—is not the focus of the poster, and Toulouse-Lautrec makes sure of it not only by placing her somewhat indistinctly in the poorly lit background, but even by going to the length of deliberately cutting her head off... Toulouse-Lautrec has made good use of spatter, a technique which adds another dimension to poster art: here, for example, it effectively separates the solid black of Jane’s dress from the less important dark mass of the bar and the orchestra” (Wine Spectator, 42).