The Two Girlfriends

Two seated women form a compact knot of shoulders, sleeves and folded legs. One dark-haired head inclines towards a fair-haired companion; pale faces emerge from a web of blue contours. At the right edge, part of a third woman interrupts the pair’s self-contained arrangement. This is Les deux amies, the 1894 painting in the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec at Albi, also known in English as The Two Girlfriends. Its concentrated arrangement belongs to Lautrec’s sustained investigation of figures within an upholstered interior. ^[1]

Two women, and a third at the edge

The title directs attention to the seated pair, but the painting does not contain only two figures. A standing woman is cropped by the upper and right borders. Her partial presence matters: the central group occupies a room shared with someone beyond the picture’s principal embrace of forms. The narrow sliver of her clothing keeps the scene open where the two seated bodies seem most firmly gathered together. Looking first at that edge changes the picture from an isolated double portrait into a fragment of a larger interior. ^[1]

The nearer woman turns her face to the right. Her dark hair is described with strong blue lines that continue around the neck and shoulders. The other woman rises higher in the composition, with fair hair gathered above her head and a lighter face inclined towards her companion. Their heads come close together without resolving into one shape. A narrow interval, a change in direction and the contrast between dark and light hair preserve the individuality of each profile. Their proximity is visible; the reason for it remains open.

Across the middle, the clothing gathers the figures into a broader, almost continuous mass. Sleeves and folds overlap until it takes a second look to separate one body from the other. A pale hand appears near the centre, where the draped forms meet. Lower down, an exposed knee and the dark length of a stocking interrupt the fabric. These small areas of flesh provide points of orientation within the extensive tangle of marks. Lautrec gives the viewer enough information to read the arrangement while retaining its complicated overlaps. ^[1]

This is an image of physical closeness, but a pose cannot supply a biography. The regional museum places Les deux amies among Lautrec’s pictures of the brothel world; its account does not name the seated women. Neither the translated title nor the inclination of their heads establishes their personal relationship. The painting can accommodate a response of tenderness without requiring us to turn that response into a documented exchange between identified people. Its human interest begins in the specificity of the two figures rather than in an invented conversation. ^[1]

The room holds the bodies

The red seat is more than a colourful background. Its curved edge carries the lower contour of the nearer woman and gives the seated group a firm base. The upholstery rises behind the dark head at the left, then drops beneath the body. These changes in direction allow the viewer to recognise the seat even where its construction is only lightly indicated. A few red strokes can suggest a back, a cushion and a front edge without describing every seam. The furniture supports both the bodies represented and the design of the painting. ^[1]

Behind the pair, thin verticals and short horizontal strokes suggest the divisions of a panelled wall. They establish a different rhythm from the sweeping curves of the figures. The women’s clothing bends, folds and slopes across the picture; the background rises in relatively straight lines. Their curved silhouette is consequently legible against an interior that remains spare and upright. The long dark line descending from the top, just left of the fair-haired woman’s head, also helps anchor the crowded central group within the height of the support.

The foreground is less fully described. Below the seat, the ochre ground opens into a broad area with only a few curving strokes. That comparatively empty space prevents the entire surface from becoming equally dense. It also gives the lower edge of the furniture room to register. Our eye can travel through this open area before returning to the knot of sleeves and faces above. An apparently slight passage therefore performs a substantial compositional task: it sets the concentrated encounter at a distance within the picture.

The third figure supplies another measure of space. Because her body is only partly visible, she suggests a continuation beyond the frame that the wall alone could not provide. Her pale clothing also creates a separate vertical patch at the right, balancing the red upholstery at the left. Yet the painting does not explain where she is going or what she is doing. Cropping introduces a person into the room while withholding the information that would make her a participant in a definite story. ^[1]

Blue lines across an ochre surface

The most insistent colour is often the blue of the drawing. It outlines the dark-haired woman’s head, traces shoulders, runs through fabric and thickens around the lower legs. These marks do more than enclose areas of colour. Several follow a contour in parallel, so that a sleeve or a bent knee seems to be discovered through repeated movements. Elsewhere a line crosses a patch of paint or extends beyond it. The image retains the activity of finding a form rather than concealing every stage beneath an even finish. ^[1]

That distinction is especially clear in the garments. Their folds are built from directional strokes rather than from smoothly blended transitions. Pale ochre, greenish grey and blue run beside one another. A long diagonal mark may describe a fold while also carrying the eye towards the central hand; a curved stroke can belong both to a hem and to the rounded shape of the whole seated group. In these passages, drawing and colour work together so closely that separating them would miss the effect of the surface.

The cardboard’s brownish tone remains visually active throughout. It supplies a common field for the wall, the open foreground and the more lightly covered parts of the clothing. This continuity helps the figures belong to their surroundings despite the force of their outlines. The pale faces stand out because their paint interrupts that general ochre field; the red seat has a similar concentrating effect at the left. The whole picture is held together by the recurring ground as much as by its stronger accents. The museum identifies the material as oil on cardboard; the visible thinness alone does not establish a particular paint recipe or solvent. ^[1]

The combination rewards looking at more than the faces. At a distance, the principal impression is the pair’s close arrangement. Up close, the eye encounters an independent movement of stripes, loops and short strokes. The open wall and foreground give those marks space to remain distinct. What looks swiftly stated is also selective: the crowded centre, the spare margins and the red supporting curve do different kinds of work. For the broader relationship between drawing and painting in Lautrec’s practice, see Style and Technique.

A separate pair at Tate

Lautrec painted a closely related vertical composition now belonging to Tate, The Two Friends, dated 1894. Its support measures 47.9 × 34 cm, and its accession number is N05142. Ronald Alley’s 1981 catalogue distinguishes that picture, Dortu P.549, from the Albi composition, P.550. He singles out the standing figure cut by the right edge in the Albi work and suggests that it may represent a subsequent stage in the development of the arrangement. The proposed sequence is an interpretation, not a dated record of consecutive painting sessions. ^[2]

Seeing the two pictures together clarifies how much Lautrec could change within a similar motif. In the Tate painting, the nearer woman is wrapped in a broad pinkish shawl; her fair-haired companion wears a pale violet jacket over a lighter greenish garment. A conspicuous hand descends across the front of the shawl. The larger sweep of fabric stretches towards the right edge, and the standing figure found at Albi is absent. At Albi, sharper diagonal folds and the dark stocking produce a tighter, more angular lower group. These are differences in the construction of the image, not merely changes in its colouring. ^[2]

The repeated subject thus offers a useful lesson in reading a study. A relationship between two works need not mean that one is an exact rehearsal for the other. Lautrec can retain two inclined heads and a shared seat while reconsidering the surrounding space, the distribution of pale fabric and the points at which bodies overlap. Each picture preserves a distinct solution. The Albi painting’s third figure is especially valuable because it connects the concentrated pair to an interior extending beyond them.

Towards the Salon of the Rue des Moulins

Alley connects these studies with the much larger 1894 In the Salon of the Rue des Moulins. His account is careful: he proposes the Tate painting as an early study for the larger work’s right side, while stressing that the resemblance is general. The Albi version, with its additional figure, enters that discussion as another possible stage. The connection helps explain the sustained attention to seating and grouped bodies, but it does not make every gesture a preliminary version of a gesture in the final canvas. ^[2]

In the large Salon, a red divan spreads across the foreground, and the women occupy a much more extensive architectural setting. Two prominent seated figures no longer incline their heads together as they do in Les deux amies. A red cushion intervenes, different directions of looking become visible, and the extended legs carry the composition across a wider field. The Musée Toulouse-Lautrec’s commentary emphasises the canvas’s closed arrangement, its empty foreground seating and the individual treatment of the faces. Comparing the pictures reveals a redistribution of bodies and intervals rather than the simple enlargement of a small sketch. ^[9]

Another preparatory drawing strengthens this understanding of Lautrec’s working process. Writing about a drawing acquired by Albi in 2026, museum director Fanny Girard describes a series of studies exploring the room, its furniture, the positions of figures and the appearance of individual models. The acquired sheet uses blue and red pencils to establish the salon’s central post and surrounding seats. Girard notes that its poses remain some distance from those adopted in the finished painting. Her account concerns that particular drawing, but it gives a concrete example of the larger composition developing through alternatives. ^[12]

Les deux amies is compelling within that process because it concentrates on a problem the broad salon scene resolves differently: how to join two bodies so closely without losing their distinct contours. The heads make a small, concentrated centre; the clothes create a larger enclosing shape; the third figure opens the arrangement towards the room. Those relationships remain worth following even without deciding exactly where the picture stands in a sequence of preparatory work.

Closeness and everyday life

Lautrec’s depictions of these interiors extend across paintings and prints. In her Metropolitan Museum catalogue, Colta Ives discusses his studies of women away from encounters with customers alongside the later Elles lithographs. That framework directs attention to ordinary postures and activities, rather than treating every interior as a scene of sexual transaction. It also helps explain why clothing, furniture and small bodily adjustments can carry so much of the subject. The print suite has its own materials and organisation, explored in Elles; this oil painting remains a separate object. ^[10]

Such context should sharpen observation without replacing it. Here, the faces are close, the bodies share a seat and a third person is partly present. We cannot recover a spoken exchange from the direction of a head. Nor does the room’s historical association establish what each sitter felt while the artist worked. The painting makes a particular arrangement of people available to our attention while leaving their private experience beyond our reach.

The collection history provides a different kind of connection. The regional record lists the Comtesse A. de Toulouse-Lautrec as a former owner and identifies the painting as entering the public collection through donation. That information belongs to the Albi object. The Shearman bequest associated with Tate’s similarly titled picture belongs to the other work. Keeping those histories distinct allows the quieter differences within the paintings—the cropped standing figure, the folds, the hand and the open ground—to become visible again. ^{[1] [2]}