Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) painted Carmen Gaudin

Often the portraits of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) take a back seat to his popular poster art. As we saw with his portraits of Suzanne Valadon, he created serious paintings of those he encountered in Montmartre. One of his favorite models, in addition to Suzanne Valadon, was another laundress named Carmen Gaudin (1866?–1920).

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin , 1885

My favorites of his portraits, by far, are his early paintings of Carmen Gaudin.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin Red-Headed Woman in a White Blouse in the Artist's Studio

The model for this series of Lautrec paintings Carmen Gaudin apparently made her living as a laundress, model, and prostitute.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin

It is reported that Lautrec spotted Carmen, as she was leaving a Montmartre restaurant sometime in the summer of 1885.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin The Red-Headed Woman

Lautrec was reportedly infatuated with red-headed women. He seemed to be attracted to Carmen both for her beauty & her tawdriness. He had been born into a traditional, well-to-do family.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin


Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin Lowered Head 1885

Lautrec is supposed to have intended to improve her lot in life by making her his model, but it appears that she had already posed for the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, and later worked as a model for artist Fernand Cormon as well. Cormon was Lautrec's art teacher.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin At Montrouge. 1886-87.

In autumn 1885, Lautrec wrote to his aristocratic mother, that he was "painting a woman whose hair is absolute gold," referring to Carmen. Tucked deep into the artist's community at Montmartre was the garden of Monsieur Pere Foret, where Toulouse-Lautrec executed a series of pleasant plein-air paintings of Carmen Gaudin

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin Red-Headed Woman in the Garden of M. Foret, Summer 1887

 He was able to portray Carmen in realistic poses and situations which he would not have been able to do with client friends from his family.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin 1889

Throughout his voluminous body of work his models were often prostitutes, commonly the only source of female models willing to bare more than their face or hands.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin Woman in a Garden 1889

Lautrec did not portray his models in a demeaning way, he seemed to want to capture the spirit of his models. And, with them, he could play with light and shadows, as he could not with traditional portraits.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin as The Laundress. 1889, although some say that the model for this particular painting, and perhaps the following portrait, was Suzanne Valadon, during a period when her hair was dyed red.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Carmen Gaudin Red-Haired Woman The Toilette. 1889.

"We Are Made of Starstuff.”

This landscape of “mountains” & “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the 1st time previously invisible areas of star birth. (NASA)

Dear old Hubble & the new James Webb Telescope, the largest space observatory to date, & thousands of scientists around the world will lead us into countless universes & 100 billion galaxies of composed of dying stars expelling dust & gas - elements & gases interchangeable with ours. We are part of infinity living on a tiny blue dot in space. “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

"The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

"It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

―American astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space