The Parisian street, where the wide variety of the capital's inhabitants necessarily crossed each other's paths, had long been a subject for artists, and street life fascinated Toulouse-Lautrec and his contemporaries. Toulouse-Lautrec frequently focused on interactions between the sexes, particularly those involving young, working class women and well-to-do men. In this way the street served as an open-air theater, the backdrop to social display, comical encounters, and—potentially—sexual transactions. Other artists, like Pierre Bonnard, took a broader perspective, composing street scenes filled with multiple figures, each scene representing a slice of life in the big, bustling city.
