Toulouse-Lautrec painted the banker Henri Fourcade in the foreground and his own cousin, Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran, also wearing a top hat, in the background. Monsieur Fourcade was shown for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants in 1889 (n. 258), the year it was painted; another pointer to the fact that the artist did not regard it as a study. The composition shows a tense, if not deliberately disconcerting, relation between scale and distance. On the one hand, the scene is set at medium or close, rather like the cinema’s “American shot”; on the other hand, Fourcade’s figure juts out toward the viewer, achieving a remarkably realistic effect enhanced by the tridimensionality and psychological depth of the countenance showing the artist’s concern with form, while the other elements are reduced to a totally incorporeal graphic kineticism.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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