The Moulin Rouge dance hall opened in Montmartre in 1889 and Toulouse-Lautrec was a regular from the beginning. For his first poster and for the first time in poster design, Toulouse-Lautrec featured the actual entertainers in the advertisement: La Goulue (the Glutton) dancing the can-can accompanied by her partner "No-Bones" Valentin.

No one in the fall of 1891 would have predicted that this ephemeral advertisement would become within days a collected item, within weeks the object of press reviews, within months the partner of paintings in avant-garde exhibitions, and within a year the internationally recognized symbol of 1890s Paris.