Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

The French painter and graphic artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born in Albi on November 24, 1864, the scion of one of the oldest noble families in France. In 1872 the family moved to Paris. At the age of ten, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec began to suffer from the effects of a hereditary disease, the treatment of which forced the boy to spend long periods of time lying in bed and in a sanatorium. To pass the time, he occupied himself with painting and drawing. From 1882 he finally attended the private painting schools of Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon in Paris. However, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's painting style was to be much more influenced by his numerous visits to the exhibitions of Parisian contemporaries such as Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin or Edgar Degas, whom he greatly admired; he was close friends with the artists Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's compositional style was also inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, which were becoming newly known and especially popular in Parisian artistic circles at this time. Artist of the Paris Belle Époque. Like no other artist, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec captured the Parisian lifestyle of the Belle Époque in his paintings and prints. He loved to portray the ladies and guests of Parisian nightclubs. When the Moulin Rouge vaudeville theater opened in Paris on October 5, 1889, a large-scale circus painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec hung in the entrance hall, making him suddenly famous in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec became world famous with the groundbreaking design of his posters for the Moulin Rouge or the Théâtre des Varietés and other venues on Montmartre, his depictions of the popular dancer Jane Avril and the cancan dancers, the singer Yvette Guilbert or the singer Aristide Bruant. Poster art at the beginning of modernism. Around 1890, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec adopted the technique of color lithography for this group of motifs and for his posters. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec quickly achieved great mastery in the lithographic technique as well as in his design style, with which he outlined the essentials in elegant beauty and large, flat color forms. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's poster style was to become groundbreaking for poster art at the beginning of the 20th century. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec created with enormous productivity, but after only a few furious creative years in Paris, as a regular with a fixed table at the Moulin Rouge including enormous alcohol consumption, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was exhausted around 1900. Despite a sickly consistency and his early death at only 37, he left behind an extensive oeuvre with over 5,000 drawings, 359 lithographs, 737 oil paintings and 275 watercolors. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec left the majority of his works to his mother, at whose instigation the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec was established in Albi in 1922. Two recent exhibitions illustrate the appreciation of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's work to this day: in 2019, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston will present the exhibition "Toulouse-Lautrec and the Stars of Paris"; in 2019/20, the Grand Palais in Paris, together with the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec in Albi, will host a magnificent retrospective. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec died on September 9, 1901 at Malromé Castle in the Gironde.