Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (born November 24, 1864, Albi, France—died September 9, 1901, Malromé) was a French artist who observed and documented with great psychological insight the personalities and facets of Parisian nightlife and the French world of entertainment in the 1890s. His use of free-flowing expressive line, often becoming pure arabesque, resulted in highly rhythmical compositions (e.g., In the Circus Fernando: The Ringmaster, 1888). The extreme simplification in outline and movement and the use of large color areas make his posters some of his most powerful works.

Childhood and education

Toulouse-Lautrec’s family was wealthy and had a lineage that extended without interruption back to the time of Charlemagne. He grew up amid his family’s typically aristocratic love of sport and art. Most of the boy’s time was spent at the Château du Bosc, one of the family estates located near Albi. Henri’s grandfather, father, and uncle were all talented draftsmen, and thus it was hardly surprising that Henri began sketching at the age of 10. His interest in art grew as a result of his being incapacitated in 1878 by an accident in which he broke his left thighbone. His right thighbone was fractured a little more than a year later in a second mishap. These accidents, requiring extensive periods of convalescence and often painful treatments, left his legs atrophied and made walking most difficult. As a result, Toulouse-Lautrec devoted ever greater periods to art in order to pass away the frequently lonely hours.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s first visit to Paris occurred in 1872, when he enrolled in the Lycée Fontanes (now Lycée Condorcet). He gradually moved on to private tutors, and it was only after he had passed the baccalaureate examinations, in 1881, that he resolved to become an artist.

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His first professional teacher in painting was René Princeteau, a friend of the Lautrec family. Princeteau’s fame, such as it was, arose from his depiction of military and equestrian subjects, done in a 19th-century academic style. Though Toulouse-Lautrec got on well with Princeteau, he moved on to the atelier of Léon Bonnat at the end of 1882. In Bonnat, Toulouse-Lautrec encountered an artist who fought vehemently against deviation from academic rules, condemned the slapdash approach of the Impressionists, and judged Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawing “atrocious.” His work received a more positive reaction in 1883, when he joined the studio of Fernand Cormon.

(Impressionist or not? Find out in our list of Artists Mistaken for Impressionists.)

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In the early 1880s, Cormon enjoyed a moment of celebrity, and his studio attracted such artists as Vincent van Gogh and the Symbolist painter Émile Bernard. Cormon gave Toulouse-Lautrec much freedom in developing a personal style. That Cormon approved of his pupil’s work is proved by his choosing Toulouse-Lautrec to assist him in illustrating the definitive edition of the works of Victor Hugo. In the end, however, Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawings for this project were not used.

Despite this approval, Toulouse-Lautrec found the atmosphere at Cormon’s studio increasingly restrictive. “Cormon’s corrections are much kinder than Bonnat’s were,” he wrote his uncle Charles on February 18, 1883. “He looks at everything you show him and encourages one steadily. It might surprise you, but I don’t like that so much. You see, the lashing of my former master pepped me up, and I didn’t spare myself.” The academic regimen of copying became insufferable. He made “a great effort to copy the model exactly,” one of his friends later recalled, “but in spite of himself he exaggerated certain details, sometimes the general character, so that he distorted without trying or even wanting to.” Soon Toulouse-Lautrec’s attendance at the studio became infrequent at best. He then rented his own studio in the Montmartre district of Paris and concerned himself, for the most part, with doing portraits of his friends.

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The documenter of Montmartre

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Thus it was that in the mid-1880s Toulouse-Lautrec began his lifelong association with the bohemian life of Montmartre. The cafés, cabarets, entertainers, and artists of this area of Paris fascinated him and led to his first taste of public recognition. He focused his attention on depicting popular entertainers such as Aristide Bruant, Jane Avril, Loie Fuller, May Belfort, May Milton, Valentin le Désossé, Louise Weber (known as La Goulue [“the Glutton”]), and clowns such as Cha-U-Kao and Chocolat.

In 1884 Toulouse-Lautrec made the acquaintance of Bruant, a singer and composer who owned a cabaret called the Mirliton. Impressed by his work, Bruant asked him to prepare illustrations for his songs and offered the Mirliton as a place where Toulouse-Lautrec could exhibit his works. By this means and through reproductions of his drawings in Bruant’s magazine Mirliton, he became known in Montmartre and started to receive commissions.

Toulouse-Lautrec sought to capture the effect of the movement of the figure through wholly original means. For example, his contemporary Edgar Degas (whose works, along with Japanese prints, were a principal influence on him) expressed movement by carefully rendering the anatomical structure of several closely grouped figures, attempting in this way to depict but one figure, caught at successive moments in time. Toulouse-Lautrec, on the other hand, employed freely handled line and color that in themselves conveyed the idea of movement. Lines were no longer bound to what was anatomically correct; colors were intense and in their juxtapositions generated a pulsating rhythm; laws of perspective were violated in order to place figures in an active, unstable relationship with their surroundings. A common device of Toulouse-Lautrec was to compose the figures so that their legs were not visible. Though this characteristic has been interpreted as the artist’s reaction to his own atrophied legs, in fact the treatment eliminated specific movement, which could then be replaced by the essence of movement. The result was an art throbbing with life and energy, that in its formal abstraction and overall two-dimensionality presaged the turn to schools of Fauvism and Cubism in the first decade of the 20th century.

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The originality of Toulouse-Lautrec also emerged in his posters. Rejecting the notion of high art, done in the traditional medium of oil on canvas, Toulouse-Lautrec in 1891 did his first poster, Moulin Rouge—La Goulue. This poster won Toulouse-Lautrec increasing fame. “My poster is pasted today on the walls of Paris,” the artist proudly declared. It was one of more than 30 he would create in the 10 years before his death. Posters afforded Toulouse-Lautrec the possibility of a widespread impact for his art, no longer restricted by the limitations of easel painting. They also enhanced the success he had enjoyed in the preceding year when his works were shown in Brussels at the Exposition des XX (the Twenty), an avant-garde association, and in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants.

Toulouse-Lautrec is most important for his success in going beyond a representation of superficial reality to a profound insight into the psychological makeup of his subjects. He turned to the lithograph after 1892 as a medium well suited to this goal. Among more than 300 lithographs produced in the final decade of his life were an album of 11 prints titled Le Café Concert (1893); 16 lithographs of the entertainer Yvette Guilbert (1894); and a series of 22 illustrations for Jules Renard’s Les Histoires naturelles (1899). But none of these works is more significant than Elles, a series done in 1896, presenting a sensitive portrayal of brothel life. Toulouse-Lautrec spent lengthy periods observing the actions and behavior of prostitutes and their clients. The resulting 11 works revealed these individuals as human beings, with some of the same strengths and many of the weaknesses of other members of society. A masterpiece of this genre is Au salon de la rue des Moulins (At the Salon). This painting evokes sympathy from the spectator as he observes the women’s isolation and loneliness, qualities which the young Toulouse-Lautrec had so often experienced himself. At the Salon is a brilliant demonstration, therefore, of his stated desire to “depict the true and not the ideal,” in which truth is based not on a careful representation of detail but rather on capturing, in a few brief brushstrokes, the essential nature of a subject.

The appearance of Elles coincided with a growing deterioration in his physical and mental condition. Toulouse-Lautrec’s figure, even among the great human diversity found in Montmartre, remained unmistakable. Not quite five feet one inch tall, his size seemed further diminished because of his practice of associating with unusually tall men, such as his fellow students Maxime Dethomas and Louis Anquetin and his cousin and close friend Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran. His frequently ironic tone failed to mask a fundamental dislike of his physical appearance, and his letters contain many derogatory remarks about his body and references to an increasing number of ailments, including syphilis. Drinking heavily in the late 1890s, when he reputedly helped popularize the cocktail, he suffered a mental collapse at the beginning of 1899. The immediate cause was the sudden unexplained departure of his mother from Paris on January 3. He was always close to his family, particularly to his mother, who had always supported his ambitions, and he interpreted her leaving as a betrayal. The effect on his weakened system was severe, and he was committed shortly thereafter to a sanatorium in Neuilly-sur-Seine. This decision was made by the artist’s mother, against the advice of relatives and friends of the artist, in the hope of avoiding a scandal.

Toulouse-Lautrec remained formally committed until March 31, 1899, though he chose to stay on at the sanatorium until mid-May. While there he was able to demonstrate his lucidity and power of memory by preparing a number of works on the theme of the circus. These works, however, lack the force and intensity of his earlier compositions. In the spring of 1900 he started drinking heavily again. Less than three months before his 37th birthday, he died at Château de Malromé.