Like his friends Maurice Joyant and Émile Davaust, or Admiral Paul Viaud, Toulouse-Lautrec loved the ocean and was a real seafarer, a strong swimmer, and intrepid helmsman. In 1900, the Comtesse de Toulouse-Lautrec asked Viaud to help the artist “dry out” after a stay at a clinic for alcoholics in Neuilly but the admiral was thwarted by liquor hidden in the hollowed stem of his walking stick. Paul Viaud in an Admiral’s Costume of the 28th Century (The Admiral Viaud), executed between July and August 1901 to decorate the hall of Château de Malromé, may have belonged to the series of large-format canvases interrupted because of the artist’s death. Unfinished or not, the canvas marked not only Toulouse-Lautrec’s return to pure painting, but one of the most intense and monumental moments of French pictorial culture shortly before the color paroxysms of the Fauvists.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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