#58 The Sofa — Mug

For about two years Toulouse-Lautrec lived in the brothels of Paris, took his meals there and painted what he saw when nobody was performing. This is one of those pictures: two women resting on a sofa, drawn with the same unsentimental attention he gave to dancers and drinkers. No moral is offered and none is implied. He was not visiting to look; he was there long enough that the women stopped noticing him. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.