Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) began drawing as a child, immersing himself in art in his teens as he recovered from breaking both his legs in accidents at the family’s estate in southern France. Encouraged by his art teacher, he left home to pursue painting in Paris in the early 1880s, and from the very beginning of his career he took the people of Montmartre as his subjects. While he is celebrated for his depictions of the lively entertainments of fin-de-siècle Paris—from the spectacle of the circus and the café-concert to its cabarets, dancehalls and brothels—he also earned renown as a master of the portrait.

In his female portraits, Lautrec tended to represent young and working-class women—mostly laundresses, dancers, and women of the brothel—but in his male portraits he usually focused on bourgeois subjects, depicting elegantly attired modern gentleman in the era's fashionable top hats and capes. Monsieur Henri Nocq, the subject of this painting, was a Belgian artist, craftsman, and editor of an arts magazine, whom Lautrec had befriended in recent years and with whom he enjoyed a lively correspondence on theories of art. With this portrait, Lautrec invites the viewer into his studio, situating Nocq in front of his unfinished painting Marcelle Lender Dancing the Bolero in “Chilpéric” (1895-96, today in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington), his subject’s stance echoing that of the matador in the unfinished painting. Working with his favored medium of peinture à l’essence—oil paint thinned with turpentine, a medium he liked for its fluidity—Lautrec quickly renders his friend with his distinctive loose and evocative brushwork. Unlike many painters who required models to hold their pose for prolonged periods, Lautrec preferred to capture the energy and motion of animated subjects. The artist’s fast, expressive strokes add a sense of immediacy to the scene, as if Nocq has popped by for a quick visit and Lautrec has captured his image as the two discussed art, craft, and life.

Presenting Nocq as an elegant dandy, Lautrec apparently took so many liberties with Nocq's likeness that Nocq was said to have found the finished painting "merciless" and "spiteful in the extreme." Nevertheless, the portrait remained in Nocq’s collection for at least three decades.