# Monsieur Boileau at the Café

- By: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901)
- Date: 1893
- Medium: oil and tempera with charcoal on millboard
- Classification: Drawing
- Dimensions: Sheet: 80.3 x 65 cm (31 5/8 x 25 9/16 in.)
- Culture: France, 19th century
- Credit line: Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection
- Museum: [Cleveland Museum of Art](https://clevelandart.org/art/1925.1409)
- Rights: [Public domain (CC0)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
- Picture: https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1925.1409/1925.1409_web.jpg
- Who can see it: Teens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

Cleveland’s 1925 purchase of this work by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec marked the first acquisition of one of the artist’s drawings by a museum in the United States. Its subject, Monsieur Boileau, was a gossip columnist known to drink heavily at Le Mirliton, a nightclub. Here, saturated, acidic tones evoke the room’s gas lamps and thinned oil paint absorbs into its support, producing texture that complements the scene’s grittiness. In his own time, Toulouse-Lautrec was considered a portraitist for such depictions of friends and other inhabitants of his neighborhood. He preferred drawing for its immediacy, using it to record his sitters’ personalities through materials and formal choices.