Société Réaliste

The Hangover (Suzanne Valadon) (French: Gueule de Bois), also known as The Drinker (French: La Buveuse), is a late 1880s, oil-on-canvas painting by French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The painting was created just before he became successful as an artist. It depicts a drunken woman drinking alone in a club, reflecting the counterculture of Montmartre and the spectre of alcoholism among French women during the Belle Époque. The model in The Hangover is artist Suzanne Valadon, Lautrec's lover. In the early 1880s, after falling from a circus trapeze at the age of 15 and suffering a back injury, Valadon began working as an art model in Montmartre. She had been drawing all her life, but now she pursued a career as an artist, becoming the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.