Was born 2 December 1864 in Albi. He was the eldest son of a family that came from a prestigious background and preserved the noble title of Count.
His parents had married for convenience and they separated after the death of their second son when he was only one year old. His mother was the closest affectionate figure that he had in his childhood and his adolescence and he later incorporated her in numerous drawings for which she posed as a model. His father, Count Alfonso, was eccentric. He loved horses and hunting and dreamed of a destiny of adventures for his son. The environment in which he developed his gifted talent was not hostile as his father used to sculpt and his uncle was attracted to painting. His early childhood years were spent hunting and riding, and at the same time his natural talent for drawing began to develop. When he was 14 years old he had an accident in which he broke his left femur, and the following year he fell off a slope and broke his right femur. Unfortunately, the union of the bones was poorly done and he was left with a deformity in his muscles. The inheritor of the Lautrec was thus a deformed man as he had the body of a man with small legs – not surpassing 1.52 m in height. All this pointed to something that the family had never wanted to admit: that he suffered from an illness of the bones that was hereditary and that had begun to manifest itself when he was 10 years old. (His parents were first cousins). Either lying on his bed or on a lounge chair in the garden, Toulouse-Lautrec never stopped drawing. He concentrated his activity in his hand and in his eyes, with carriages, amazons and country chores. When he was 18 years old and with the complete freedom granted by his family, he chose his profession and financially supported by them, travelled to Paris where he entered the studio of Bonat, who told him: “Your drawing is terrible”. Years later when he was the President of the Council of Museums he prevented the entry of Lautrec`s painting to the Louvre Museum. In the midst of young painters open to life, he immediately managed to contact those people connected to impressionism. During the day he would accompany his cousin, a doctor, on his rounds to visit sick patients and took notes not only of the hospital wards but also of the mortuary. The themes he would paint about were already fixed in his mind, as well as the environment in which he would live. In 1889 he settled in Montmartre and worked intensely, becoming interested only in people – men, beasts and life – and scorning landscapes and landscape painters. For him painting was only a means of saying what he wished to say and he always remained the aristocrat who wanted to observe, draw and paint. He felt excluded from the world that he painted on account of his deformity and because of the consciousness he had of certain things. He made a series of portraits at the same time that he was influenced by Japanese painting, due to its characteristics of simplicity in great areas and unusual cuts on the borders. He then changed and started to paint posters, which made him known to the people.
In 1891, the Moulin Rouge entrusted him to paint a poster of La Goulue, showing the ballerina in the daring attitude of picking up her skirts. This is a work of art – the birth of the modern poster. In this new field that he entered, influenced by his own painting, there is nothing left but to compare the portraits of that time, “In Moulin-Rouge” and “La Goulue and her Sister at the Moulin-Rouge” with the former ones to notice the new orientation. He did 31 posters. The last one, “Gypsy”, dates from 1900 and was passed onto a colour lithograph. “The Englishman” and “The Goulue on the Arm of Mme Fromage” would be part of the 400 works of art – 50 of them in colour – that would make up one of the most beautiful groups that have ever been printed on stone. He was inspired by women who were not terribly brilliant and were rather coarse, and he felt a strong passion towards certain protagonists of the Parisian scene.
Night after night he would return to the same places to repeat studies and sketches, dedicating long periods to some characters of the cafe-concerts. He pursued the soul of the prostitutes and entered the world of the whorehouses, where he found his best models, such as “Jane Avril”, whose features and figures are confused with the inspiration of the artist. His family, because of its long lineage, always recognized and sustained him during his trips and exhibitions abroad, for wherever he went he was above all a “Lautrec”. When the abuse of alcohol started to destroy him, his father advised him to go to England where drunks were so common they were ignored. He therefore left Montmartre and went to the bars in England, where he mixed alcoholic drinks so much that his health was seriously affected and his production of works decreased notably. His life was in constant disorder. He would go, quite naturally, from sports events to bars frequented by lesbians or to whorehouses. These years were interrupted with trips and some exhibitions. In London, among his many works, he made a portrait of Oscar Wilde. He set up an exhibition in London that did not meet with the approval of the public, but the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) visited the exhibition and found the painter asleep upon an armchair, having given specific instructions not to be disturbed under any circumstance. He was indeed an extravagant man! On another occasion, in which there was an inauguration of art, he dressed up as the barman and served more than 500 guests, whom he left quite astonished at his behaviour. The mental unbalance of the artist became steadily deeper and it was also reflected in his painting. In 1899, during a stay at Villeneuve, he suffered an attack of “delirium-tremens” and started shooting at non-existent spiders. His mother authorized that he be placed in a sanatorium to be disintoxicated, but one year later he suffered a stroke, from which he never recovered. By then seriously ill, his paintings immediately acquired greater value. He died in Mallarme on 9 December 1901, when he was only 37 years old.
