It is not on canvas. The support is a sheet of cardboard, about sixty-three centimetres by eighty-one, and the oil has been thinned to a wash with turpentine so that it sinks straight in. What is left on the surface is pigment and the brown of the board.
Oil thinned until it behaves like pastel
The method has a name: peinture à l'essence. Oil paint cut hard with turpentine, brushed onto cardboard that has not been primed or sealed. The board drinks the medium, the colour stays put, and the finished thing dries dead matt — nearer a pastel than an oil painting, and with colours that have barely shifted since.
He would lay in a face or a silhouette with fast strokes of thinned purple, vermilion or carmine, then add a few white highlights and some dark hatching, and stop. Large areas of board are left bare on purpose, doing the work a mid-tone does, which is why the pictures look drawn rather than built up.
Cardboard was also cheap, and he used a great deal of it. A man who worked fast, in rooms he did not own, needed a support he could carry under his arm and did not have to stretch.
Two women, nothing happening
The picture is two women resting on a sofa. Nobody is posing, nobody is dancing, nobody is looking out at anybody. One is propped against the arm and one is turned in towards her, and the sofa takes up most of the width of the board.
He painted it between about 1894 and 1896, in the Paris brothels, where he stayed for a spell in 1894. That is the reason the picture exists in this form: he was there in the ordinary hours, when the work had stopped, so what he had in front of him was two colleagues on a sofa in the afternoon.
Compare it with the posters. The posters are all performance — legs, hats, lamplight, a crowd. This is the dressing room after everyone has gone home, and it is drawn with exactly the same attention.
Nobody bought them
In 1896 he gathered the same subject into a set of ten colour lithographs called Elles, published by Gustave Pellet in an edition of one hundred and shown at the Salon des Cent that year. The portfolios found almost no buyers.
The reason usually given is the one that matters: the prints are intimate rather than voyeuristic. A woman doing her hair, a woman washing, a woman asleep. Somebody paying for a portfolio about brothels in 1896 was not buying it for the washing, and the edition sat there.
He was dead five years later, at thirty-six. The pictures nobody wanted are the ones now hung in the Metropolitan Museum, the Musée d'Orsay and Albi, and the posters that paid the bills are the ones on student walls.
Two women, a sofa and an afternoon off, painted on cardboard. In 1896 that was the part nobody wanted.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.