An Examination at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris

This painting is Lautrec’s last work. It was executed between the beginning of May and the end of July 1901, only a few months before his death. It shows his cousin Gabriel Tapi� de C�leyran taking his viva voce for his degree in medicine, although Tapi� had in fact already qualified in 1899.

The candidate is sitting on the far left, red-faced in front of his professors, like a delinquent before a tribunal. The dark, barely illuminated scene seems out of keeping with Lautrec, and is more reminiscent of Dutch portraits in the seventeenth-century Baroque style.