Monsieur Boileau at the Café (1893): Art, History and Details

Monsieur Boileau at the Café (1893) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Cleveland’s 1925 purchase of this work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec marked the first acquisition of one of the artist’s drawings by a museum in the United States. Its subject, Monsieur Boileau, was a gossip columnist known to drink heavily at Le Mirliton, a nightclub. Here, saturated, acidic tones evoke the room’s gas lamps and thinned oil paint absorbs into its support, producing texture that complements the scene’s grittiness. In his own time, Toulouse-Lautrec was considered a portraitist for such depictions of friends and other inhabitants of his neighborhood. He preferred drawing for its immediacy, using it to record his sitters’ personalities through materials and formal choices.

Object facts

• Title: Monsieur Boileau at the Café
• Date: 1893
• Creator attribution: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: oil and tempera with charcoal on millboard
• Dimensions: Sheet: 80.3 x 65 cm (31 5/8 x 25 9/16 in.); Framed: 105.4 x 89.5 x 8.3 cm (41 1/2 x 35 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1925.1409

A detail from the museum

The green drink on the table is probably absinthe, a popular drink with artists at the time that was thought to have hallucinogenic properties.

Collection credit

Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Becker, Jack F., Gertrud Oelsner, Kevin Sharp, Taylor J. Acosta, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Ordrupgaardsamlingen, and Joslyn Art Museum. Café Society : Art and Sociability in Belle Époque Paris. Edited by Julie Novarese Pierotti. Memphis, Lewes, UK: Dixon Gallery and Gardens, In association with D Giles Limited, 2026.
• Exposition des Indépendants. Exh. Cat. Paris: Pavillion de la ville, 1893.
• Saunier, Charles. "Critique d'Art: Salon des Indépendants," La Plume, no. 96 (April 15, 1893): 171-73.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.