Aristide Bruant, at His Cabaret

Aristide Bruant, at His Cabaret

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Aristide Bruant was a successful singer, songwriter, and entrepreneur who ran a cabaret in the Montmartre quarter of Paris. When he began performing at up-scale café-concerts on the Champs-Élysées, he immediately commissioned Toulouse-Lautrec to market his rough street persona in a manner that would appeal to a bourgeois audience. Seizing on Bruant's trademark costume of a wide-brimmed hat, cape, and red scarf, Lautrec designed a sparse yet iconic image that promoted both the performer's career as well as his own.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Aristide Bruant, at His CabaretAristide Bruant, at His CabaretAristide Bruant, at His CabaretAristide Bruant, at His CabaretAristide Bruant, at His Cabaret

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.