This painting was once in two pieces. Look at the right edge of the canvas today and you're looking at a repair, not the way Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec left it.
What you're looking at
At the Moulin Rouge shows a table of regulars at the famous Paris cabaret, painted between 1892 and 1895. Toulouse-Lautrec knew this world intimately — he spent his nights sketching the dancers, singers, and drinkers of Montmartre, and the mood here is close and a little unsettling: faces lit strangely from below, no one quite looking at each other.
The canvas that was cut apart
After Toulouse-Lautrec's death, the section on the right side of the painting, showing a face lit in green, was physically removed from the canvas. It was likely cut away to make the painting easier to sell as a smaller, simpler picture. At some point it was reattached, and the seam where the two pieces meet is documented in the Art Institute of Chicago's own conservation record, where the painting now hangs.
So the picture you see today has a history of its own, separate from the cabaret scene it shows: a canvas that was dismembered and made whole again, decades after the artist who painted it had died.
One detail to look for
Look closely near the right edge, at the green-lit face. That's the section that was cut away and reattached. It's a rare case where you can trace an actual physical repair on a painting this famous, rather than just a story about it.
See it at its real size
The original painting measures 123 x 141 cm, close to four feet across, and our print sizes are labeled honestly against that true scale. Shop the canvas print.