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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
(Nov. 24, 1864 Albi, Fr. - Sep. 9, 1901 Fr.) French Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec lived and worked in Paris during the late 19th century, among many immortal painters includind Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Vincent Van Gogh. Toulouse-Lautrec observed and captured in his art the Parisian nightlife of the period. His work was graphic in nature, the paint never obscuring the strong, original draftsmanship. He detailed the music halls, circuses, brothels and the cabaret life of Paris with a remarkable objectivity. His garish and artificial colors, the orange hair and electric green light of his striking posters, caught the atmosphere of the life they advertised.
He was an aristocrat, the son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse (his father was descended from the semi royal counts of Toulouse) and last in line of a family that dated back a thousand years. Henri's father was rich, handsome and eccentric. His mother was overly devoted to her only child. Henri was weak and often sick. By the time he was 10 he had begun to draw and paint. At 12 young Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at 14 his right leg. The bones never healed properly and eventually stopped growing. He reached young adulthood with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He was only 1.5 meters, four and a half feet tall. Daunted by his image, Lautrec threw himself into art, became a heavy drinker and compensated for his appearance with an engaging personality.
Deprived of the kind of life that a normal body would have permitted, Toulouse-Lautrec lived wholly for his artwork. Showing an early gift for drawing, he studied academic art with and set up a studio of his own when he was 21. He stayed in the Montmartre section of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to paint. Circuses, dance halls and nightclubs, brothels, racetracks, all these spectacles, Lautrec deftly captured the mood and gestures. He would sit at a crowded nightclub table, laughing and drinking and at the same time he would make swift sketches. The next morning in his art studio he would expand the sketches which he later taped to his walls as reference into brightly colored oil paintings.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was very much a part of all this activity and in order to become a part of the Montmartre life, as well as to protect himself against the crowd's ridicule of his appearance, Toulouse-Lautrec began to drink heavily. In the late 1890s Lautrec's excessive drinking began to catch up with him and his artwork began to deteriorate. He was confined to a sanatorium and to his mother's care at home, but he could not stay away from alcohol. By 1899 the artist suffered a complete mental breakdown and again was confined to a sanatorium, he suffered a second breakdown and died at the age of only 36 at the family chateau. Since then his oil paintings and posters, particularly the Moulin Rouge group, have been in great demand and bring high prices at auctions and art sales.
Today, Toulouse-Latrec's artwork is celebrated not just for its joy of life, but for its historic value as an accurate documentation of his generation. Lautrec's technical innovations in color lithography created a greater freedom and a new immediacy in poster design. His art of the dancers and personalities at the Moulin Rouge cabaret are world famous and have inspired countless imitations. Although exhibitions of his work were not well received in his lifetime, he is now represented in the major museums of the world as one of the worlds artists.
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