Art in Focus: Toulouse-Lautrec

Born to an aristocratic family, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec manifested an extraordinary and precocious talent for drawing, as caricatures in his schoolbooks demonstrate. However, in his day professional artists were decidedly rare in families of this rank, and presumably Henri was meant to follow family tradition and take up a military career. However, his poor health and leg fractures in 1878 and 1879, which failed to heal properly, restricted young Henri’s freedom considerably, prompting his mother to foster her son’s artistic talent. Initially, Toulouse-Lautrec began to study subjects from his immediate environment, making drawing or small oil paintings. His first teacher, the deaf-mute animal artist René Princeteau, convinced his parents to allow their son to train as a painter. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s interest in living things, in the restless and momentary, was already evident in his early works, with scenes of horses, riders and hunting. In his self-portraits, he began to establish an individual personality.