Portrait Bust of Mademoiselle Marcelle Lender

The Portrait Bust of Mademoiselle Marcelle Lender by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, created in 1895, is an exceptional example of fin-de-siècle printmaking. This particular piece is a crayon lithograph printed in a distinctive olive green ink on wove paper. Its significance is heightened by its technical status: it represents the extremely rare first state of four, confirmed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be one of only two known impressions. This early state captures the freshness and immediacy of Toulouse-Lautrec's draftsmanship before further additions or refinements were made in subsequent editions of the print.

The subject of the work is Marcelle Lender, a highly popular dancer and actress in the Parisian cabarets and theaters that fascinated Toulouse-Lautrec. The artist often used prints to capture the dynamic personalities of the period’s performers and celebrities. Lender is depicted in a sophisticated profile, a compositional technique frequently employed by Toulouse-Lautrec to emphasize the sharp contours and elegance of his female subjects. Though rendered as a bust, the print suggests the sophisticated public presence of the woman, typical of the era's focus on celebrity and the burgeoning culture of performance arts.

The medium of lithography allowed Toulouse-Lautrec to achieve nuanced tonal variations through the application of crayon, lending the work a distinctively painterly quality despite its classification as graphic arts. The artist's mastery of the lithographic process is evident in the subtle shading achieved through the unusual choice of olive green ink. This extremely rare impression is part of the distinguished collection of prints held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it serves as a key document of both the history of French prints and the influential portraits created by Toulouse-Lautrec during the late 19th century.