Dr. Péan Operating

Jules-Émile Péan (1830-1898) was one of the most celebrated surgeons in fin-de-siècle Paris, famous for his theatrical operating style and for performing procedures previously considered impossibly dangerous. Lautrec attended Péan's public operating sessions at the Saint-Louis Hospital in 1891 and produced several studies of the surgeon at work — an unusual incursion of his observer's eye into the world of medical theater. The operating room shared with the circus, the cabaret, and the brothel the quality of professional performance under extreme social conditions that Lautrec found endlessly compelling.

Lautrec renders the operating scene with the rapid compositional decisiveness that characterizes his documentary work — the surgeon's dominant figure at the center, assistants arranged around the table, the concentrated professional action caught in the language of his brushwork. His characteristic thinned paint achieves an almost watercolor-like speed of notation.