Macklowe Gallery Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Salon des Cent

Salon des Cent: Exposition Internationale d'affiches, also commonly know as La Passagère du 54 or Promendae en Yacht is a remarkable and romantic lithograph by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in which an elegantly posed and fashionably dressed young woman is caught in repose considering the great expanses of sea before her. The young woman in question was a figure personally, if briefly, known to Lautrec; she was a fellow passenger on a ship Lautrec was taking to visit his mother in Bordeaux in 1895. Despite the fact that she was on her way to Africa to meet her husband, Lautrec became so smitten with her beauty that he stayed on the boat, intent on following her all the way to Dakar. It took Lautrec's traveling companion, Maurice Guibert, to pull the artist off the boat, but he was unable to do so until the ship reached Lisbon.