And it may be that Lautrec is a very different artist than some people anticipated. People came knowing his posters of the Moulin Rouge, but they then discovered that he's a very accomplished painter with a depth of humanity that wasn't known to most people.

For a long time we've had a very important collection of Monet works from every decade of his career from the 1860s to the 1920s, but what we were missing was an exceptionally fine example of his latest decade in extraordinary condition and quality, ... This painting gives us that.

His greatest asset is a rare and deep understanding of the interrelatedness of those disciplines.