Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born on Nov. 24, 1864, in Albi, France. He
was an
aristocrat, the son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de 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 living 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 failed to heal properly, and his legs stopped growing. He reached young
adulthood with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He
was only 4 1/2 feet (1.5 meters) tall.
Deprived of the kind of life that a normal body would have permitted,
Toulouse-Lautrec lived wholly for his art. 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, racetracks all these
spectacles were set down on canvas or made into lithographs.
Toulouse-Lautrec was very much a part of all this activity. 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 studio he would expand the sketches into
bright-colored paintings. 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 1890s the drinking
started to affect his health. He was confined to a sanatorium and to his
mother's care at home, but he could not stay away from alcohol. Toulouse-Lautrec
died on Sept. 9, 1901, at the family chateau of Malrome. Since then his
paintings and posters particularly the 'Moulin Rouge' group have been in great
demand and bring high prices at auctions and art sales.