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Toulouse-Lautrec: "THE Modern Artisan" was a line of luxury goods, including ceramics, jewellery, lampshades, and other objects of interior decoration, created by the designer André Marty and sold at the locations listed at the bottom of the poster. With a touch of bawdy humor, Lautrec shows the artisan standing ready to serve his client in any way she desires. |
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This farcical scene is based on the old theme of the doctor's visit. Found in seventeenth-century prints and paintings, and revived in eighteenth-century French art, this mildly erotic setup features bedridden young ladies visited by lecherous doctors. Almost invariably a maid and little dog provide reactions that give away their mistress's malady as lovesickness, while the doctor treats his patient in a variety of titillating ways. Lautrec parodies eighteenth-century art in the rococo style of the poster, but has replaced the traditional doctor with a modern craftsman whose worker's smock, hammer, and tool kit are comic variants on medical accoutrements. The stock characters of surprised maid and lap dog reveal what he is about to fix, and the wallpaper pattern of curvilinear exclamation marks both punctuates the joke and burlesques Art Noveau decoration. Lautrec may have been in collusion with his friends in this rascally spoof on Marty's wares. He included his own monogram and the name of the artist who designed the poster's text (Niederkorn) on the toolbox, and portrayed another friend, the Belgian jeweler and medallist Henri Nocq, as the visiting artisan. L'Artisan Moderne |
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