Paris Album [antikvár]

Introduction Toulouse-Lautrec is so small he makes me dizççy.—Mme Tristan Bernard. On November 24, 1864, at Albi in the south of France, was born Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa. His stock was one of the oldest and noblest in France, but in him it freaked; he had a congenital weakness of the legs, offset by what was to prove an abnormal strength of visual perception. From his childhood onwards, he drew voraciously, and especially after 1878, when he broke a leg for the first time. The next year he broke the other leg, and soon it was clear that his legs were never to grow normally. He set for life into a crippled mis-shape, with a normal body and dwarf-sized legs. His physical deformity was surely a decisive factor in his resolve to become a professional artist (a career unheard-of in his family). He studied to begin with under two artists of orthodox practice and theory in Paris, first with the academic and fashionable portrait painter, Bonnat, and then with Cormon (where he met, especially, Vincent van Gogh). In 188 5 he established his own studio at No. 7 Rue Tourlaque, and there he worked for some thirteen years—almost the entire compass of his brief maturity. His life and his work centred mostly in and around Montmartre, and both living and working were driven at a pitch that would have killed many far stronger men more quickly than it did him; pencil in hand, he haunted music-halls, cafés, bars, brothels, circuses and theatres; the stimulants that kept him going were drink, women, and his work. In 1889, he first showed at the Salon des Indépendants; in 1891, his revolutionary work as a poster-artist began, and in the year after, his first colour-prints. Production during the next few years was intense until, in 1898, his health began to betray grave signs of strain. By 1899, his addiction to drink had become a morbid alcoholism, and, after a complete breakdown, he had to withdraw to a private asylum at Neuilly, where he stayed for three months. Recovering for a spell, he emerged, only to succumb finally and fatally. He died on September 9th, 1901, in his thirty-seventh year. The major artistic influences on his work were two: Degas, and the Japanese masters of the colour-print. In his earliest lithographs he tended to use colour and mass much as a painter does, but soon he developed a tech-