This is one of numerous images produced during the 1890s showing women looking at prints in Paris. As the account books of print dealers like Edmond Sagot indicate, women were often customers, typically buying decorative prints and framed posters. The fashionably dressed woman here might even have been one of the many American women who frequented such shops on their European travels in search of culture and couture. The silhouetted figure of the woman and the shadowy interior serve to emphasize the lettering on the lighter areas of the windowpane and the curtains, promoting an exhibition of the work of painter lithographers to be held in the Salle de Figaro on the Rue Drouout. This was a compositional device often employed by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, one of the key figures in avant-garde poster design of the era.