Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Born into one of the oldest aristocratic families in France, Toulouse-Lautrec suffered two accidents as a teenager — in 1878 and 1879, each breaking a leg — whose bones never properly healed, leaving him with the trunk of a full-grown man on the legs of a child. The physical difference drove him from the family estates into Paris and ultimately into Montmartre, the bohemian quarter on the north slope of the hill where the Moulin Rouge, the Divan Japonais and the cabarets of the Belle Époque were doing their business. He moved in rather than observed from outside, drinking at the same bars, sleeping with the same women, becoming a familiar of every performer and working woman on the hill. The work that came from this immersion was original in every medium he touched: oil paintings and cardboard panels with a characteristic thin wash of heavily diluted paint; prints in which he compressed three or four colors into compositions of arresting graphic power; and above all the lithographic posters he produced between 1891 and 1900 that more or less invented the language of modern advertising. The Moulin Rouge posters with their flat color blocks, hand-lettered typography and willingness to crop a dancer at mid-thigh drew directly from Japanese woodblocks and produced images instantly recognizable to anyone who has walked through a Paris tourist shop. He died at thirty-six in September 1901, his health destroyed by alcoholism and syphilis combined. His mother had him brought to the family château, where he died. The nine hundred paintings, three hundred and fifty prints and more than five thousand drawings he left behind are held in largest concentration at the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum in Albi, his birthplace.