La Toilette (Toulouse-Lautrec)

The painting depicts a domestic scene of a woman, sitting on a plain towel or sheet over a dark rug on the bare floorboards.

It employs a light colour palette, predominantly blues with yellowish greens and red for the woman's hair, thinned with turpentine to create a loose effect.

The furniture, recognisable from contemporaneous photographs, suggests the work was painted at Toulouse-Lautrec's studio on the rue Caulaincourt [fr] in Paris.

It was catalogued as La toilette and dated 1896 for some time, but recent research suggests it was painted several years earlier, in 1889.

It was one of two works that Toulouse-Lautrec exhibited with Les XX ("The twenty", an avant-garde art group) in Brussels in 1890 under the title Rousse (red-head).