Louis VALTAT (1869 - 1952) Au Moulin Rouge (recto); Scène de café (verso), 1895 Pastel and watercolor on brown paper. Stamped lower right. 64.5 x 49.5 cm Provenance : - Probably Collection Ambroise Vollard, Paris. - Probably Madame de Galéa, Paris. By descent, to her son Robert de Galéa, Poissy and Chantilly. - Schröder & Leisewitz Kunsthandel, Bremen, 1979. - Private collection, northern Germany. Exhibition: Louis Valtat 1869-1952, Galerie Durand-Ruel, Paris, March 21 - April 11, 1963, no. 6. A notice of inclusion in the Archives of the Association des Amis de Louis Valtat, dated September 28, 2023, will be given to the purchaser. Louis Valtat exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants from 1893 and presented paintings and prints at the Salon des Cent in 1894. That same year, he worked alongside Toulouse-Lautrec and André on the set for the first production of Aurélien Lugné-Poë's Chariot de terre cuite at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris. Lautrec's influence is reflected in Valtat's choice of motifs and in his images of the city's lively nightlife, with its boulevards, bars, cafés-concerts, clubs, variety shows and dance halls. Oils such as Le Couple au Lapin Agile and Chez Maxim's - both executed in 1895 - saw him adopt the simplified forms and flat tints of color he had seen in Lautrec's work. But this Lautrean approach was short-lived. Only a small number of Valtat's works are stylistically similar to our sheet. One of these is the pastel Aux Courses, executed in 1895. The front of our sheet illustrates with apparent nonchalance a scene of Parisian nightlife, capturing the atmosphere of an evening at the Moulin Rouge. The center of the image is occupied by a cape-clad woman seated on a bench. Her lips are painted bright red and her brown hair is crowned with a floral headdress. A gauze veil partially conceals her attentive gaze. To her left, a hastily drawn figure with a pointed chin, sharp mask-like features and an oddly shaped headdress turns towards her. The curved back of a chair is depicted in the right foreground, while the contours of an arm, truncated at the shoulder, suggest the presence of a seated male figure. A pair of yellow columns define the background, where groups of guests are seated. Behind them, a crowd gathers on the dance floor. It is unclear whether the scene depicted behind the woman is seen directly, or whether it is actually a reflection in a mirror. Lautrec's famous painting Au Moulin Rouge depicts a similarly ambiguous spatial situation. In an essay entitled "Dance Halls" published in the catalog of the Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre exhibition in 2005, Richard Thomson describes the Moulin Rouge and its audience as follows: "The Moulin Rouge was opened by Charles Zidler and his partner Joseph Oller in October 1889... Like the Jardin de Paris, the Moulin Rouge offers a series of attractions. The dance floor hosted high-flying dancers such as La Goulue and La Môme Fromage; a stage hosted café-concerts with singers ranging from the popular Yvette Guilbert to the famous Le Pétomane; the garden offered donkey rides and bowling; and new entertainments such as processions and costume balls regularly drew the public's attention. [...] Oller and Zidler cleverly set up their new leisure center on Boulevard de Clichy, one of the outer boulevards separating the affluent center of Paris from the more popular Montmartre district. [...] The owners must surely have been aware that their flashy attractions thrived on prostitution. Although they didn't profit directly from this market, the barely concealed presence of prostitutes within their walls served as bait for their clientele". In his painting L'Anglais au Moulin Rouge, Lautrec depicts an elegant foreigner talking to two elegantly dressed vamps. The moment captured here by Valtat is frozen in time, its outcome left to the viewer's imagination. The juxtaposition of bright blue pastels with touches of yellow, the robustness of the brushstrokes, the strength of the freedom of the line, and the choice of grey-brown paper, reveal the true extent of Lautrec's stylistic influence on the young Valtat. In this respect, the comparison between this pastel by Valtat and Lautrec's oil and pastel portrait of May Milton is illuminating. Valtat's Café Scene - executed in watercolor and pastel on the reverse of this sheet - is