Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster of naughty lady-loving Irishwoman Miss May Belfort, originally Mary Egan from Mayo, Ireland: vaudeville singer, child impersonator and, for a brief fleeting moment in May 1895 (there are a lot of ‘mays’ in this post), the star of Parisian cafe society.
May’s ”slightly disturbing and thinly-veiled erotic” act was performed wearing the dress of a little girl with large puffed sleeves and an enormous bonnet (see above). Often she clutched a black cat, in reference to her most famous song, ‘Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow-wow’, her well known sapphic inclinations adding a particular piquancy to its opening lines:-
” I love my little cat, I do
With soft black silky hair
It comes with me each day to school
And sits upon the chair.”
May and Toulouse-Lautrec met at the Irish-American Bar, Paris, where May had been brought by her lover the dancer May Milton, who had in her turn been previously introduced to Parisian cafe society by her love Jane Avril.
Toulouse-Lautrec drew posters for all of them, but the two Mays soon disappeared from the Parisian stage and only Jane is really remembered today; check out her poster as shown in this 1940s fashion shot with the lovely Lisa Fonssagrives, below; later in life Lisa herself was to attain iconic status as 101 Dalmatians’ Cruella de Vil…
The question all men ask when they see work by Toulouse-Lautrec: were his women really as, ahem, unusual-looking as he drew them? Check out the photos below of May B, May M and Jane (in that order) and decide yourself…
What happened to May Belfort in the end? Well, it looks like she stayed in vaudeville after retiring from the Parisian stage due to ‘ill-health’, thankfully not singing the same song though; from this account it appears that she was still round in England in 1906 getting into trouble for using other people’s material without paying royalties. From the title of the song in question (“The Rake’s Progress”) it appears that her tastes may have changed since her Irish-American Bar days, or perhaps she was simply adapting her material to suit a less sophisticated audience.
It appears May may have died in 1929 or so, but the precise circumstances leading up to her death are not generally known. What is clear, however, is that she did not, ever, ever, return to Mayo. And who could blame her for that?
Poor Lautrec. He was born to lose. (groan.)
That said (unfortunately), there is a case to be made that Lautrec’s aesthetic of elevating low-cafe-society images to the status of high art, amplified by art’s status today as a faux-religion in which aesthetics replaces any kind of genuine spirituality, greatly romanticizes and idealizes the lives of essentially marginal, eccentric, and ultimately inconsequential performers of only fleeting interest. (As their later lives testify.) Not thatg it’s not interesting or fun to read about them (it is- no criticism intended), but I can’t help being a little annoyed at the fetishistsic idealization of such people, given how many other worthy, accomplished, and important lives of the period are basically ignored. (Harrumph. Sorry if this is a bit negative…)
No, that’s okay. I find something off about the posters.myself. Green and sickly.
I am also sure May’s act must have been ghastly…
Surely the point about posters is that they’re posters? I wonder if part of T-L’s influence is that later artists didn’t realise his posters had a different purpose from his fine art?
Point taken about the posters being posters and not fine art- it’s our contemporary art critical-cultural establishment that has a tendency to elevate even minor works by “canonical masters” to the status of high art. e.g.: I wonder how much any one of those posters would go at an auction. T-L’s own focus was evidently just on the music-hall culture- although he may have been, somewhat in the manner of Warhol after him, making a statement about the value and aesthetics of pop-culture images. Then again- I really don’t know too much about this. Sorry again if the comment was a little too negative or sour- wouldn’t want to inhibit any further entries in the “Irish Femmes Fatales” series-!
No problem, Maurice. I love spirited disagreement.
But, frankly, I think your view of this post would have been much more positive had the ladies been hotter. Compare to your more favourable, almost gushing, attitude to the girls on my Donald Davies post…
I didn’t know Lautrec was Irish.
Only insofar as he liked to hang out at the Irish-American bar. That would make a lot of people Irish ;-0