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Latest revision as of 08:12, 12 June 2007About
 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 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.
The artist created his first lithograph in 1891. His involvement in the actual printing process was not very close. For the best known lithographs like Le Divan Japonais, he prepared one or several drawings and sketches. It can be assumed that the transformation on a lithograph plate was performed by a professional printer. Edition sizes and the papers used, vary widely. Small editions were made in 50 or 100 copies, sometimes in different versions, on Velin or on Japan paper. Aside from the regular editions, also hors de commerce copies can be found. Small editions are mostly numbered and some were signed personally by Toulouse Lautrec. For the popular large editions, poster paper was used. The edition sizes were not documented. They are guessed as something between 500 and 3,000 copies. They are all unnumbered and unsigned - of course. But they have either his signature or his initials HT or a stamp mark engraved on stone. The graphic work of Lautrec consists of a total of 351 lithographs and 9 drypoint prints. Contact
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