Art Gallery

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de (1864-1901), French postimpressionist painter, lithographer, and illustrator. Born in Albi, Toulouse-Lautrec started painting in childhood and later studied with French academic painters. He frequented the Moulin Rouge and other cabarets of the Montmartre district of Paris, as well as the theater, the circus, and brothels. Toulouse-Lautrec preserved his impressions of these places and their celebrities in portraits and sketches of striking originality and power. He was a prolific artist, creating great numbers of paintings, drawings, etchings, lithographs, posters, and newspaper illustrations. Toulouse-Lautrec was influenced by various contemporary artists, including French painters Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin.

His subject matter became intimately connected with the life he led. He frequented theatres, cabarets, circuses, bars, dance-halls and brothels, rendering these scenes realistically but as seen through the lens of his genius. He showed his work on Montmartre. He spent every summer by the sea. In 1886 he had a brief relationship with the model Suzanne Valadon, who was also a painter, and during this year his first drawings were published in magazines.

In 1888 he showed his work at the Les XX exhibition in Brussels, and Theo van Gogh bought one of his pictures for the Goupil gallery. In 1889 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants and became a regular at the newly-opened Moulin Rouge. In 1890 he went with Signac to the Les XX exhibition in Brussels, then visited Spain. In 1891 he joined the Impressionists and Symbolists at their exhibition in the gallery Le Barc de Boutteville and began to produce posters in a novel, stylised manner for bars, music-halls and book publishers. His poster of the singer Aristide Bruant made him famous overnight. In 1892 he visited London.

In 1893 he had his first one-man exhibition at Goupil and contributed to other exhibitions. From time to time he lived in brothels to draw and paint there. Between 1894 and 1897 he travelled in France and Belgium, Holland, Spain, London and Lisbon. He exhibited at the Salon Libre Esthétique in Brussels, had contact with the Nabis group of artists and the journal La Revue Blanche, and he became increasingly dependent on alcohol. He collapsed in 1899 and was taken to mental hospital in Neuilly, against which his friends protested, but he continued to drink. In 1901 he suffered a partial paralysis and died at his mother's château. Toulouse-Lautrec painted with verve and excelled in graphic art. His lithographs and posters are still being copied today. Only lightly touched by Impressionism, his work had a stamp of its own. Ccharacterized by his handling of line and the dynamic use of colour.