Mary Hamilton (from Le Café Concert)

Mary Hamilton (from Le Café Concert) is a brush and crayon lithograph printed in light olive green ink on wove paper, created by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in 1893. This expressive print captures the vibrant atmosphere and personalities of fin-de-siècle Parisian nightlife.

Executed in its only known state, the piece showcases Toulouse-Lautrec’s innovative mastery of the lithographic medium, combining the gestural immediacy of drawing with the reproducibility inherent in fine art prints. The use of light olive green ink lends the image a somber, unified quality, characteristic of the subdued palette the artist often employed to evoke the dim, smoky interiors of the venues he frequented.

The work belongs to a significant period of Toulouse-Lautrec’s career where he focused intensely on documenting the entertainment world, particularly the café-concerts and music halls of Montmartre. These environments were central to modern Parisian culture and provided him with endless opportunities to study the public and private lives of the performers and patrons. Mary Hamilton, featured here, is one of the many professional women whose portraits the artist included in his series on this milieu.

Toulouse-Lautrec often used minimal, economical lines and blocks of color to emphasize character and movement, a style that heavily influenced modern graphic design and the emergence of poster art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds this important lithograph in its collection, representing a key example of French Post-Impressionist prints, celebrated for its candid psychological portrayal. High-resolution images of this masterwork are widely distributed, making the study of these public domain artworks accessible to researchers worldwide.