Buveuse ou Gueule de bois
(Woman sitting at a table or Hangover) (1889)
(c) Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Tous droits réservés.

In Paris, Lautrec painted and drew subjects recalling Montmartre and the world of workers he mingled with there. Genuine social case studies, his subjects follow the naturalist vein. The drawings he published in the press made his name better known.

In 1889, Woman sitting at a table (or Hangover) appeared in the Courrier Français. The model, Suzanne Valadon, the painter's mistress at the time, is leaning her elbows on the table, with an overwhelmed air, her absent gaze lost in the void, sitting in front of a heartily consumed bottle.

Among the characters from the stage community who inspired Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Yvette Guilbert is high on the list.
At the Eden-Concert, where she began in 1889, she invented her long and slender silhouette covered in green silk, arms decked in black gloves. Lautrec was later to turn these accessories into a symbol.