alize about the principal differences between vanguard images of the prostitute from the 18508 i. and i86os and avant-garde treatments of the same theme during the 18705 and the early i88os Gustave (the pictures under consideration in the present work), we could point to a comparative absence Courbet, or avoidance of story line in many of the later pictures. The typical images of prostitutes (Salon Young Ladies and vanguard alike) produced during the July Monarchy and Second Empire provided enough on the Banks behavioral and social denotations so that an unfolding story could be traced, so that a plausible of the Seine accompanying text would tend to come to mind for the average viewer. That story telling re- (Summer), mained an essential tool of communication for the Salon painter in the 18708 and i88os is 1856, oil apparent in a work like A. Vely's Love and Money from the Salon of 1878 (fig. 3). on canvas, In images of contemporary prostitution from the end of the century, there was again a gen- Musee du eral predisposition to tell a visually legible story. In the late i88os and iSgos, the illustrated Petit Palais, press (Le Courrier Frangais, Gil Bias, and Le Mirliton, for example) exploded with caricatures Paris. and cartoons of prostitutes. But it is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's single-minded concentration on brothel prostitutes in his art in the iSgos - resulting in fifty pictures between 1892 and 1894 alone — that has forged an indelible link between fin-de-siecle Parisian art and the theme of 3