At Christmas 2025, I was in Paris and visited the Musée d’Orsay. On the second floor, among the Post-Impressionists, I stood in front of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting “Woman with a Black Boa.” The work was painted in 1892 in oil on cardboard.
In this particular painting, the natural brown color of the cardboard remains visible.
The woman with the black boa and her serious expression immediately caught my attention!
She has an expressive face and dark hair. She’s wearing a black boa that wraps around her neck, giving her an elegant and slightly mysterious look. Her gaze is serious, as if she were lost in thought. She neither smiles nor tries to impress. She stands before us with an air of naturalness that makes her seem real, as if she hadn’t simply posed for Lautrec to paint her.
Lautrec loved to paint women from the brothels of Paris, not only for their appearance, but to show their everyday lives and their human side. Perhaps he saw in them something of his own sense of otherness and loneliness.
Through my own eyes, what I saw and what moved me was that behind the face and the black boa, I sensed a person with thoughts, feelings, and an unknown story. As I looked at her, I wondered what might have been going through her mind at that moment. And just like that, through a painting so simple and true, I felt as though I had gotten a little closer to the life of a woman who lived many years before me.