The Masked Ball at the Elysée Montmartre

Painted in 1887 and now at the San Diego Museum of Art, this scene of a masked ball at the Élysée-Montmartre captures one of the great popular entertainment venues of late nineteenth-century Paris. The Élysée-Montmartre on the Boulevard de Rochechouart was one of the large public dance halls that provided cheap entertainment for the mixed-class Parisian public — students, workers, bourgeois, and tourists mingling in the democratic space of the masked ball. Lautrec was a regular observer and participant in these events, and the masquerade tradition — disguise, role-playing, social transgression — resonated with his own sense of living in a performed social world.

The crowd scene at the masked ball is resolved into a loose arrangement of figures in various states of costumed transformation, with Lautrec's rapid observation condensing the movement and energy of the dance. The artificial evening light creates stronger tonal contrasts than his exterior subjects, with warm flesh tones and jewel colours punctuating the darker surroundings.