Collection: Toulouse Lautrec Illustrates the Belle Époque

Toulouse-Lautrec was a brilliant and obsessive draftsman, so lithography was a natural choice for him. Moving to Paris in 1882, he studied with the academic artists Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon, meeting both Vincent van Gogh and Louis Anquetin at the latter’s studio. Although Toulouse-Lautrec was independent of any particular artistic movement, his work reflects his appreciation of Degas and Daumier. He was also sensitive to the art of the Gauguin-influenced avant-garde group known as the Nabis and was a friend of the young Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

Above all, Toulouse-Lautrec was a keen observer of the psychological motives underlying the activities of both the players and observers in the theatre world, cabarets, circuses, the demimonde, brothels and their habitués in Montmartre, where he set up his studio. He conveyed their true character by mimicking and exaggerating their facial expressions and body language. Like many modern artists in Paris in the latter century, Toulouse-Lautrec was also drawn to Japanese prints, in which the flat fields of colour, the actors’ exaggerated grimaces, and the formalized, powerfully theatrical compositions captured the effects he sought to convey in the at times vice-ridden Parisian social world he was depicting. Through colour lithography, which perfectly complemented his strengths as a draftsman and caricaturist, the artist would achieve that society’s enduring characterization.