Toulouse-Lautrec:
La pendu
Click on the poster for a larger reproduction

An advertisement for the historical novel Les Drames de Toulouse by A. Siegel, which was published as a serial in the Toulouse newspaper La Dépêche. The sheet would be mounted in the upper right corner of a larger sheet bearing the advertising text. This is a very rare poster.

Set in the eighteenth century, the first of the novel's three parts recounts the Calas affair, in which an innocent father was wrongly executed for the murder of his son. The poster illustrates the episode in which he discovers his son's hanged body. Lautrec portrays the scene with grim realism heightened by flickering candle light. Reminiscent in tone and texture of older European prints, the image has a fictional rather than journalistic appearance that is in contrast to the eyewitness immediacy of the poster Au Pied de L'Echafaud (At the Foot of the Gallows).

La Pendu
1892; Desloge 81; W P2b; D 340
Lithograph in two colors. 31 1/4 x 23 1/4 inches.
Gift of the Baldwin M. Baldwin Foundation, 1987:23

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