Modern Age
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)
French Post-Impressionism painter.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was the sharpest draughtsman of Montmartre nightlife. Born in 1864 at Albi into an aristocratic family, he suffered broken legs in adolescence that left him with a child's stature and an adult's torso; he trained in Paris under Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon, then made the dance halls, circuses, and maisons closes of the hill his entire subject.
The posters — above all 'Moulin Rouge: La Goulue' (1891) — turned color lithography into a modern public art. In the oils, 'At the Moulin Rouge' sets the artist and his circle under the dance hall's greenish gaslight, and 'In the Salon of the Rue des Moulins' treats the waiting room of a brothel with the same unsentimental attention he gave a dancer's kick. He drank himself to collapse and died at the family estate of Malromé in 1901, aged thirty-six.
Julia Frey's biography and the catalogues assembled around M. G. Dortu's oeuvre remain the documentary base for the life and the Montmartre pictures.
The words the record keeps using: sharp, nocturnal, unsentimental, graphic, modern, acid.
At a glance
- Lived 1864–1901
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Post-Impressionism
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Engraving and etching
- Techniques Broken color
Works in the archive
- Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, 1891 (Multiple impressions; a principal example is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
The dancer La Goulue kicks, petticoats a white explosion, while Valentin le Désossé's black silhouette watches from the foreground and a ring of top hats encloses the floor. Lautrec's first great poster, it made color… - At the Moulin Rouge, 1892 (Art Institute of Chicago)
A table of regulars sits under the Moulin Rouge's greenish light; a woman at the right is cropped and mask-like, and Lautrec's own short figure appears in the background. It is his most ambitious oil of the dance hall… - In the Salon of the Rue des Moulins, 1894 (Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi)
Women wait on a plush circular banquette in a maison-close salon, one figure prominent in the foreground, others receding in boredom and talk. Lautrec's most sustained brothel interior, it treats sex work as a workplace…
What was said
Frey presents Lautrec as choosing the dance hall and the maison close as modern workplaces to be drawn without sermon — nightlife and waiting as facts of Montmartre, not as anecdote or warning.
The 1891 La Goulue poster made color lithography a primary public medium for a painter: flat silhouettes and a few letters designed to be read from the street, while still naming a specific dancer and dance hall.
The oeuvre catalogues treat the salon pictures as a sustained campaign, not a side subject — the maison close given the same unsentimental attention as the Moulin stage.
What would Henri make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Henri · Keep a life moment the way Henri would · Pictures made after Henri