Gaston Bonnefoy

In a letter of 1891 to his mother, Toulouse-Lautrec wrote, “I have just finished the portrait of Gaston Bonnefoy and am going to start that of Louis (Pascal). I hope they are not too unsightly.” The artist refers to the series of portraits of standing male figures which he showed at the Salon des Indépendants that March. In all of them Lautrec seeks to emphasise the verticality of the figures, which is heightened by the stark interior of his studio on the rue Coulaincourt, and presents us with a new type of portrait that reflects modern life, in the manner of Baudelaire’s writings. In this portrait of the physician Gaston Bonnefoy belonging to the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, the figure of the painter’s friend and regular companion between 1883 and 1899 is silhouetted against a neutral, sketched background. As Richard Thomson has pointed out, Lautrec depicts him as the prototype of a the “ boulevardier masculine, prosperous, sexually independent, attuned to the modern world” dressed in outdoor clothing with a long coat, walking stick and bowler hat, as if having just returned from a visit or about to leave. Some scholars have interpreted the horizontally positioned stick as a phallic symbol, a possible allusion to his sexual promiscuity. Paloma Alarcó