Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), French Post-Impressionist painter, lithographer, and illustrator who depicted the nightlife of late 19th-century Paris.

Toulouse-Lautrec was born in Albi on November 24, 1864, a descendant of one of the most prominent aristocratic families in France. He broke both legs as an adolescent, and because of a congenital calcium deficiency, they remained stunted for the rest of his life. His early talent for drawing was encouraged by his uncle, Count Charles de Toulouse-Lautrec, René Princeteau and John Lewis Brown, family friends who were sporting artists. He subsequently studied painting with the French academic painters Joseph Florentin Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon. Toulouse-Lautrec frequented the colourful cabarets, such as the Moulin Rouge, in the Montmartre district of Paris, where his wit attracted a large group of artists and intellectuals, including the Irish author Oscar Wilde, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, and the French singer Yvette Guilbert. He also frequented the theatre, the circus, and brothels. He recorded his impressions of these places and their celebrities in portraits and sketches of striking originality and power. Outstanding examples are La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge (1892, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi), Jane Avril Entering the Moulin Rouge (1892, Courtauld Gallery, London), and Au salon de la rue des Moulins (1894, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec). His alcoholic dissipation, however, eventually brought on a paralytic stroke, to which he succumbed at Malromé, one of his family's estates, on September 9, 1901.

Toulouse-Lautrec was a prolific creator, producing great numbers of paintings, drawings, etchings, lithographs, and posters, as well as illustrations for various contemporary newspapers. Many of his works are in the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec in Albi. He incorporated into his own highly individual style elements of the styles of various contemporaneous artists, especially those of the French painters Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin. Japanese art, then coming into vogue in Paris, also influenced him in his use of sharply delineated line, asymmetric composition, and flat areas of colour. His work inspired Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, and Georges Rouault.