It depicts a drunken woman drinking alone in a club, reflecting the counterculture of Montmartre and the spectre of alcoholism among French women during the Belle Époque.

[α] In the early 1880s, after falling from a circus trapeze at the age of 15 and suffering a back injury, Valadon began working as an art model in Montmartre.

French cabaret singer and nightclub owner Aristide Bruant is thought to have influenced the development of the painting and possibly even its title.

Lautrec drank copious amounts of alcohol to deal with pain from his assumed underlying genetic disorder which left him disabled.

In the late 1880s, Lautrec began working on a series of large paintings based on the Cirque Fernando, a popular French circus in Montmartre.

They were later prominently featured at the Moulin Rouge, and were said to be so influential that it led Georges Seurat (1859–1891), Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) to try their hand at similar circus scenes in homage to Lautrec.

[12] Historian Patrick Bade argues that Lautrec was an outsider as a disabled man in 19th-century, aristocratic French society, where he could "no longer follow the traditional outdoor pastimes of his class—notably hunting".

[14] "[H]is own sense of 'otherness' resulting from his physical appearance and infirmities gave him a strong empathy with those who would have been regarded by many of his contemporaries as deviants", writes Bade.

[15] Biographer Julia Frey believes that Lautrec was partly attracted to prostitutes as a form of rebellion against his deeply religious and controlling mother.

Waiting (c. 1887) and A la Bastille (Jeanne Wenz) (1888) are two portraits Lautrec completed based on songs by Bruant featuring the theme of women drinking alone.

Art historian Gale B. Murray takes a skeptical position, writing "although it had no direct relationship to any of Bruant's lyrics, its picture of alcoholic dissipation and despondency corresponded to the song-writer's vocabulary".

[27] At the Armory Show in 1913, the first large exhibition of modern art in the United States, it was shown with the title Woman Sitting at Table.

[29] The Hangover depicts a drunken woman drinking alone in a club, reflecting the counterculture of Montmartre and the specter of alcoholism among French women during the Belle Époque in the 1880s.

Even before Zola published his novel, Toulouse-Lautrec was likely familiar with the theme in art, which Edgar Degas notably painted earlier in L'Absinthe (1875–76), followed by Édouard Manet covering the same ground with Plum Brandy (1877) the next year.

Haussmannization contributed to the rise of café and music culture, which brought foreigners and residents displaced by construction together to mingle, socialize, and drink.

[7] The French legislature deregulated the liquor industry in 1880, leading to what historian Matthew Ramsey describes as a "rapid growth in bars and other outlets".

[7] Culinary historian Alexandra Leaf notes that by the end of the 19th century, Paris had 27,000 cafés, the highest number of retail business establishments serving alcoholic beverages in the world.

[31] In terms of the artistic milieu, Jim Drobnick of OCAD University hypothesizes a kind of "inebriationism" to describe the use of alcohol for creative purposes that was popularized in the wake of Romanticism.

Drobnick cites Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire as major exponents of intoxication, which both Van Gogh[β] and Lautrec took advantage of when it came to using absinthe in the cabarets.

"[12] Valadon may have been attracted to drinking when she had to give up her dream as a trapeze artist for the Cirque Molier after she fell and injured her back at the age of 15.

[33] As late as 1996, writes Rose, experts were still unfairly referring to Valadon as a prostitute, in spite of her many achievements in the world of art since her time as a model.

[34] Along these same lines, Kathryn Schneider of the New Orleans Museum of Art notes how Lautrec's depiction of Suzanne Valadon changed in The Hangover compared to previous paintings after their relationship soured.

The Hangover would serendipitously bring French Impressionist Edgar Degas (1834–1917) into Lautrec's orbit when it caught his attention and vocal admiration.

One day, Degas was visiting the Dihau home and noticed the drawing of The Hangover, featuring Valadon as the model, hanging on the wall.

It was later acquired by Maurice Masson in Paris and sold in 1911 to New York art dealer Stephan Bourgeois, thought to be representing Illinois native and Canadian railway tycoon William Cornelius Van Horne.

[27] The authentic work was held by Van Horne's descendants until 1946, when it was sold to art collector Maurice Wertheim for $30,000 at an auction of the family collection.