At the Moulin Rouge
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1892
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
French · 1864–1901
The aristocrat who made the cabarets, circuses and brothels of Montmartre into the great art of Paris after dark.
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Play CollectionA nobleman in the night
An aristocrat by birth, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec fractured both legs in boyhood and never grew as other men did; he turned instead to the half-world of Paris, its dance halls and circuses and houses of tolerance, and made that world his studio. History files him with the Post-Impressionists, the generation of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat.
Posters as art
The Moulin Rouge rose in Paris in 1889, and a run of posters commissioned from him carried its dancers and its name across the city. Serious painters sneered at commercial lithography; he never minded, and his designs in flat colour and a handful of lines carried the faces of Montmartre's performers onto every hoarding in the city, and into the history of art with them.
Known works
La Toilette
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1889
Musée d'Orsay
A red-haired woman sits on the floor with her back to us at her bath, stripped to the waist, the plain northern light doing all the work.
Portrait of Vincent van Gogh (1887)
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1887
Van Gogh Museum
Pastel on cardboard, built from blues, oranges and yellows: Van Gogh leans into conversation at a bar table, an absinthe in front of him, a fellow student from the open studio of Fernand Cormon.
La Rousse in a White Blouse
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1889
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
A red-headed woman in a pale blouse, her hair the one note of fire in a cool interior.
The Trap
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
National Gallery of Art
A quiet scene from the world beyond the cabarets, taken in with the same quick, certain eye he turned on the crowds.
Sources
Invite Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec into your living room
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