The Two Girl Friends

Painted in 1895 in gouache and now in the Bührle Collection in Zurich, this work depicting two women friends in intimate proximity belongs to Lautrec's sustained engagement with female same-sex relationships in the 1890s. The gouache medium gives the work a different quality from his oil paintings — more immediate and colourful, closer to his celebrated poster technique. By 1895 Lautrec was producing his most technically varied and prolific work, moving between oil, gouache, lithograph, and pastel with facility. The 'two friends' subject — tender, private, unsensationalised — represents one of his most sympathetic subject categories.

The gouache medium allows a brighter, more opaque palette than Lautrec's characteristic thin oil technique, with the colour applied in flat areas closer to his poster and lithographic work. The two figures are rendered with the same observational directness as his oil work, the intimacy of their proximity conveyed without prurience.