In a Private Dining Room

Lautrec's private dining room scenes depict the small rooms in better restaurants and maisons closes where wealthy clients entertained in relative privacy — spaces where social performance was conducted at a more intimate and often more transgressive level than the public dining room. These scenes, produced in the early 1890s, document the social rituals of wealthy Parisian men in the company of professional female companions, recording with characteristic candor the economic and erotic dynamics that organized these encounters. The private dining room was one of the defining social spaces of the Belle Époque, and Lautrec captured it as unflinchingly as he did the brothel.

Lautrec uses the artificial light of the private dining room — gas or early electric — to create the warm, slightly garish illumination that characterized these interiors and gave his figures their characteristic flushed, slightly unreal appearance. The composition's shallow space compresses the social dynamic into an uncomfortable intimacy.