Henri de Toulouse Lautrec Painting

 The painting that I chose to look at in terms of rhetorical situation is titled "The Dancer in Her Dressing Room", and was painted in 1885. 

I think that the most difficult part of rhetorical situation is the first part, purpose.  It's always difficult to make your own assumptions on what a painter is trying to get across with his or her art.  But, since I do know a little about Lautrec, I know he did many paintings at night clubs or dance halls, especially the Moulin Rouge, and my guess is that this was at one of those places.  So it seems to me that maybe the purpose is to give the people who look at his work a behind the scenes look.  A chance to see what goes on before he usually draws what he normally does.

As I sort of began to say with purpose, I think the audience would be the same people who looked at his previous work.  People that want to know more about the places his paintings are set in.  All they would have seen before was dancers who are totally prepared, but now they can see a glimpse of their life behind the stage.

The genre, clearly, is a painting.  But what makes this different is the colors he used and how he made them all kind of blend together in a really cool way.  It makes it not as easy to see what all is going on, you really have to focus and take in all the colors.  I think he would have wanted that effect, so people would stop and take longer to notice what's going on inside it.

Stance is always something that I personally find a little bit tricky with paintings.  There are no words from the creator to give you a hint at what's in their mind, so you have to go on instinct.  I think his feeling towards the painting is definitely a good one.  Instinct tells me he wanted people to see the life that was behind what he normally painted.  I feel there's a certain beauty in this piece, and he wanted to be able to show what these halls and clubs were like when you couldn't see what was happening.

And lastly the medium would be a painting , but the design is really up to Lautrec.  He made his choice, to put in lots of color, and blend them together to make the admirer look just a little bit harder.  I don't think this painting would be the same if he had made it so easy to define who is who and what exactly is going on.  I think he made the perfect choices.