Poudre de Riz by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Art in the Age of Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease that peaked in the 19th and 20th century. It is highly contagious and it is transmitted from microscopic droplets released in the air. It prompts symptoms including pale skin, a high temperature, and the tell-tale sign of coughing up blood.
Although in modern epidemiological terms TB is well know to afflict those who live and work in crowded and unsanitary conditions, throughout the eighteen and nineteen centuries it also claimed large numbers of victims among the social and cultural elite. Its victims include, John Keats, Robert Louis Stevenson, Friedrich Schiller, Edgar Alan Poe, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Bronte sisters, among others.
The disease was painful, deforming and lethal but it was also known to augment and elevate the beauty, genius and sex appeal of its victims. For women especially, it promoted a new anaemic ideal of female beauty - thin, pale and delicate. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec captured this almost diaphanous image of female beauty in his 1887 painting "Poudre de Riz" (Rice Powder), which depicts a slender and pale woman - probably the artist and his lover Suzanne Valadon - sitting before a jar of rice powder intended to whiten her face to a consumptive pallor according to the fashion of the age.
Suzanne Valadon, an accomplished artist herself, best known for her focus on the female form, became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.