Footit et Chocolat

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

According to cataloguer Wittrock this lithograph was pirnted from a stone owned by Jean Goriany, Lima, Peru for the members of The Art Institute of Chicago's Print and Drawing Club in 1947 and published as an original at the time.

Excerpt from a seminar paper written by graduate student Angela Daniels at the University of St. Thomas:

"Footit and Chocolat were the most successful interracial clown duo performing in Paris at this time. The man that assumed the character of Chocolat was an Afro-Cuban immigrant from Havana. The Englishman from Manchester who played Footit styled his character as the clever antidote to Chocolat's foolishness, thus completing the dynamic act of opposition, both in difference of skin color and personality. The exploitation of their many differences added to the comedy, which was only further heightened by the effect of their costumes.

As artist Toulouse-Lautrec's oeuvre shows, his work was highly dependent and reflective of the environment in which he lived and worked. Toulouse-Lautrec and his contemporaries in the latter half of the nineteenth century depicted the social inequalities between the bourgeoisie and the lower classes in their immediate environments. Spurred on by the failing of the Third Republic toward the lower classes, artists' imagery moved to Montmartre and the interiors of the entertainment venues where the bourgeois flocked to visually consume the spectacle of the performers on stage.

Toulouse-Lautrec depicted this dynamic in Footit et Chocolat. The space of the spectacle is contained by the boundary of the circus ring and overall cropping of the scene to frame the action of the clown duo as the object of the viewer's focus. The viewers in the scene behind the ring wear top hats, carry canes, and festoon their suits with military awards barely discernible. These are the bourgeois patrons of the circus with their physiognomies mutated by caricature, so that only their quality of dress represents them."