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Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec was born on November 24, 1864, in southern France.
Son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse, he was the last
in the line of an aristocratic family that dated back a thousand
years. Today, the family estate houses the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec.
As a child, Henri was weak and often sick. But by the time he was
ten years old he had begun to draw and paint. At age twele Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at fourteven his right leg. The bones did not heal properly, and his legs ceased to grow. He reached maturity with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He was only 4 1/2 feet (1.5 meters) tall. Depried of the physical life that a normal body would have permitted, Toulouse-Lautrec lied completely for his art. He dwelt in the Montmartre section of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loed to depict in his work. Dance halls and nightclubs, racetracks, prostitutes - all these were memorialized on canas or made into lithographs.
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Toulouse-Lautrec was ery much an actie part of this community. He would sit at a crowded nightclub table, laughing and drinking, meanwhile making swift sketches. The next morning in his studio he would expand the sketches into brightly colored paintings. In order to join in the Montmartre life - as well as to fortify himself against the crowd's ridicule of his appearance - Toulouse-Lautrec began to drink heaily. By the 1890s the drinking was affecting his health. He was confined first to a sanatorium and then to his mother's care at home, but he could not stay away from alcohol. Toulouse-Lautrec died on September 9, 1901, at the family chateau of Malrome.
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