" Chocolate Dansant Dans Un Bar - A Chocolat dancing in a bar "

Footit, the famous clown, and his Negro partner Chocolat often came to the Irish and American Bar after their performances at the Nouveau Cirque in the near-by rue Saint-Honoré; and among the regular clients for supper were the Irish singer May Belfort and the English dancer May Milton. After a few reviving drinks at the bar Footit and Chocolat, forgetting the fatigue that followed their strenuous antics at the circus, would often dance, with the most comical contortions, to the music of a mandolin played (according to Joyant) by an Englishwoman or by her son, the fruit of her union with a Texas mulatto. The preliminary sketch of Lautrec%u2019s image of Chocolat dancing in the Irish and American Bar is in Chinese ink is preserved in the museum at Albi. The %u2018Chocolat%u2019, with one hand on his hip and the other raised above his head, seems to be performing a kind of double shuffle. He wears a short jacket and skin-tight trousers; a Sherlock Holmes cap of some checked or plaid material is pulled far over his eyes. The musician %u2014 presumably the young man of mixed ancestry mentioned by Joyant %u2014 is twanging a stringed instrument that resembles an antique lyre. At the left stands the half-breed barman, and in the background is the fat English coachman of Monsieur de Rothschild, wearing a top hat. The Irish and American Bar, owned by Francis Brady Reynolds, was Lautrec's favourite resort outside the boundaries of Montmartre. The Irish and American Bar was eventually swallowed up by the expansion of its sturdier neighbour the Café Weber, which flourished for a time at the same address in the rue Royale. Originally the bar was a small place, consisting of a long narrow room with a leather banquette and a single row of little tables on one side, and a mahogany bar on the other. At the back a short flight of steps led to a tiny square room in which Lautrec usually sat; from this vantage-ground he could survey the crowd that milled in front of the bar during the apéritif hour, Ralph, the barman, claimed to be a half-breed of mixed Chinese and American Indian blood. He is described by Joyant as having " a round, yellow, hypocritical face, with almond eyes and slick black hair "; and he officiated with the impassivity of both races behind the bar, where he mixed exotic drinks of all colours of the rainbow. The clients, for the most part were connected with the racetrack: grooms, jockeys, touts bookmakers, horse dealers, many of them English or Irish There were also, on certain evenings, coachmen from various wealthy households who, while their employers dined luxuriously and in leisurely fashion at the expensive restaurants of the quarter, and the horses stood patiently outside in charge of their footmen, whiled away the tedious hours of waiting in the snug recesses of the bar. This is an original conservation linenbacked chromotypograph periodical sheet, more than 110 years old.