La danse mauresque by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Toulouse-Lautrec's Moorish or Algerian dance subjects derive from the Moorish tent and Oriental performers who appeared at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, where he witnessed exotic dance performances that he translated into several works. The 'danse mauresque' belonged to a French Orientalist entertainment culture that packaged colonial subjects as erotic spectacle for Parisian audiences, and Lautrec's engagement with it is characteristically ambiguous — recording the performance without romanticizing it, seeing the dancer as a skilled professional rather than an exotic fantasy.

Lautrec captures the whirling movement of the dance through loosely rendered robes that dissolve into swirling line and tone, a technique evolved from his continuous study of Degas's dance compositions but translated into his own more graphic, poster-influenced idiom. The figure seems to spin off the picture surface.