The finest of the six ‘Chilperic’ works (Nos. 110—115) is this sheet, published in the German magazine Pan in September 1895, an eight-colour half-length portrait of Marcelle Lender in a fantastic Spanish costume, bowing in response to the applause of the audience. No other lithograph is printed with such a wealth of subtle colour combinations, and none embodies, as this does, the opulent decoration of an age moving towards its close. The sheet then takes on its final form, with altogether seven colours laid over the olive green drawing stone in the following sequence: yellow for the hair and a smear on the forehead; grey in the sleeve and the headdress; then the powerful vermilion printed over this in the hair, to outline the face, on the lips, over the flower in the bodice and a slight touch in the corner of the eye; the soft carmine in the headdress, as a faint smear around the eye and on the flower seems to have been added later; the fifth colour is the turquoise green of the scarf, which also appears in the dress, over the brows and the eyelids, in the headdress and in individual soft outlines; finally, the background was worked in yellow ochre. Then, with the edition of the lettering: ‘ORIGINALLITHOGRAPHIE IN ACHT FARBEN VON H. DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC. PAN 13.’, the unusually large edition was printed as follows: 36 for the artist’s edition, 75 for the de luxe, and 1100 for the standard edition for the Pan magazine (1895, Vol. I, No. 3), where it was bound in between pages 196 and 197. A short text by Arsene Alexandre provided some information on the artist. Laurec wrote from Taussat on this subject to Alexandre on 8 September 1895: ‘Henri Albert, Paris editor of the magazine Pan, which is publishing one of my prints, will come to ask you for some facts on my paltry self. Since you were the first one to speak well of me, I’m anxious that you should be the one to trumpet my great deeds the other side of the Rhine’ (Goldschmidt-Schimmel, No. 193).

The Pan magazine, founded in Berlin in 1895 as an independent organ of art and literature, counted among its contributors names ranging from Verlaine and Dehmel to Panizza, Heinrich Mann and Maeterlinck. In Otto Julius Bierbaum and the twnty-seven-year-old Julius Meier-Graefe, who had come in contact with your French artists when he was in Paris on the staff of Samuel Bing’s gallery, was determined to propagate this in Germany and make Pan its main mouthpiece. But the project did not last long. Meier-Graefe’s aim to make original French graphics accessible to his readers at a low cost met with considerable resistance from his financiers after the publication of Lautrec’s colour lithograph, and they used a programmatic article by Alfred Lichtwark to speak out for maintaining the German character of the periodical (Pan I, 3, pp. 173 ff.) Finally, Meier-Graefe was urged to resign, especially since Lautrec, who had provided the lithograph free of charge for the editor’s sake, was regarded, not only in court circles, as a prime example of French frivolity. Eberhard von Bodenhausen, one of the publishers of Pan, commented in 1895: ‘This adulation of all that is foreign reached its peak when Toulouse-Lautrec, the “first and most inventive poster artist in France”, sent is a colour lithograph. The style of the poster would have caused the Parisians, who have a first-class technical training, to have jeered at him, and it is my firm opinion that he wanted to see how far the stupid Germans would go in their lack of national feeling and their blind adoration of the foreign…Here were two German editors trying to pass off as the culmination of art something by a new French artist which was not only utterly superficial, but even faulty in its technique. I immediately told Meier-Graefe at the times that the sheet was the stone over which one of us would have to fall.’

Condition:
A extremely fine, fresh impression. The colors strong and vibrant. The full sheet in excellent condition. UNLINED.

Please Note:
This example is an exact duplicate of the world record holder at auction for this print. See: Christie’s, New York, Sale # 1780, Lot # 111, 3 May 2006, $60,000. USD, Provenance: Gary Bruder, LLC