The clownesse cha-u-kao at the Moulin Rouge

Painted in 1895 on cardboard and now at the Musée d'Orsay, this is among the most celebrated of Lautrec's portraits of the performer known as Cha-U-Kao. She was a Japanese-acrobat clown whose stage name played on the French words for noise and chaos, and who performed at both the Moulin Rouge and the Nouveau Cirque. Lautrec painted her multiple times in this year with unusual depth of interest, documenting her in her clown costume, in private moments, and in her domestic life with her female companion. The Musée d'Orsay version, on cardboard, shows the yellow-clad clownesse in characteristic working costume with a direct, unsentimental gaze.

The yellow tutu and white collar of the clown costume create a bold, deliberately artificial colour scheme that Lautrec sets against the figure's observed, unmasked psychological presence. The cardboard support is used to maximum effect — its warm tone unifying the thinly applied oil paint into a surface of directness and transparency.