Jane Avril - Les Maitre de l'Affiche - 1895

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 brilliant 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. (Reference: Wagner, p.21)