Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a famous artist and poster painter, who became known for his images of popular performers and dancers of his time. He came from a privileged background but was excluded from the higher classes due to his disability. Toulouse-Lautrec found his home among circus performers, sex workers, and other artists, who paid less attention to his physical attributes. Read on to learn more about seven important works of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
1. At the Circus: Lifelong Obsession of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had a collection of genetic diseases, most likely caused by the fact that his parents were close cousins. In his early teens, he broke both of his legs, and after these events, they stopped growing altogether. He was 4’8”, with childlike legs supporting the body of a grown man. For that reason, he had difficulty walking and could not ride a horse or dance. Forced to spend days and weeks in bed due to his poor health, he found joy in sketching. He became one of the most important and revered artists of the Belle Epoque.
The circus and its performers became his lifelong obsession. He particularly loved dogs and horses and painstakingly sketched them in detail. Of the wide range of performers, he preferred to draw acrobats and equestrians, perhaps due to his own inability to even try to copy their art. During his long stays in the hospital, Toulouse-Lautrec painted them from memory, capturing horses surprisingly well but sometimes making mistakes in human anatomy.
2. The Bed
Toulouse-Lautrec’s disability made him unwelcome among the upper-class friends of his parents. Thus, he chose a company that would pay less attention to his disability—that of bohemian artists, traveling performers, and sex workers. After leaving his family chateau, Toulouse-Lautrec spent several years living in a brothel in Montmartre. He became a close friend and confidante of local sex workers, who were charmed by his politeness and sincere concern for their well-being. These years allowed Toulouse-Lautrec to learn about these women’s sensitive and domestic sides, which they usually hid from the outside world.
Many of these women found permanent relationships and long-term partners not in the outside world that despised them but within their own close-knit community. Toulouse-Lautrec often painted queer couples in the privacy of their homes and bedrooms. However, these paintings were devoid of heterosexual voyeurism, often found in such works by male artists. Rather than that, they were gentle depictions of women in love in their comfortable settings, hidden from the prying eyes.
3. Divan Japonais
Most of Toulouse-Lautrec’s prints were advertisements of shows, performances, and cabarets. In a way, they were precursors of Pop Art, as they treated advertisement as an artistic form. That particular era in French history was notable for the rapid development of expressive promoting techniques used by growing and fiercely competing businesses. Posters by Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, and other outstanding artists of the time rarely remained in their designated places for too long. People used to steal them and hang them in their homes as works of art.
Divan Japonais was a famous cafe concert—a lighthearted and frivolous show usually performed at small cafes. The venue was decorated in the immensely popular Japanese style. Toulouse-Lautrec himself was a great admirer of Japanese culture and even collected woodblock prints by Japanese artists.
4. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Performers: Jane Avril
Particular segments of Toulouse-Lautrec’s work were devoted to famous performers he worked with frequently. Jane Avril was one of such personalities. Born Jeanne Louise Boudon, she was raised by a single mother, a sex worker who abused her and planned to introduce her daughter to sex work as well. Jeanne’s father was an Italian aristocrat who took little interest in the affairs of his child. At the age of thirteen, Jeane ran away from home to escape her mother’s beatings and was soon admitted to the Salpetriere mental asylum with symptoms that corresponded to Chorea, or Saint Vitus’ Dance.
This disorder featured involuntary and irregular convulsive movements similar to a strange dance. At that time, such disorders were regarded as typical for the female hysteria. As Boudon later told the press, she received various forms of treatment, but none of them helped. The breakthrough happened during a Mardi Gras celebration in the asylum when Boudon started dancing with other patients. However, later researchers stated that although Boudon was indeed a patient of Salpetriere for a few months, her story about dancing cure most likely was a publicity stunt. Boudon’s English lover suggested she invent an anglicized pseudonym, following contemporary fashions. Thus, Jeanne Boudon became Jane Avril and made the story of her miraculous cure the core myth of her career.
5. La Goulue
Another famous performer promoted by Toulouse-Lautrec was Louise Weber, known to the public under the nickname La Goulue (the Glutton). This name stuck not because of Weber’s eating habits or body size but due to her manner in finishing drinks and snacks from the tables of the cabaret’s guests while dancing. She came from a Jewish family in Alsace and grew up helping her mother run a laundry service. However, her help with the business was nominal, as she used to steal lavish dresses left by her clients and dance in them.
She became one of the first full-time dancers at the Moulin Rouge. Her signature trick was kicking the guests’ hats with her toe and landing into full splits with a jump. La Goulue was the highest-paid dancer of her time and had a reputation as a provocative and bold performer. In 1890, Edward VII, the future King of the United Kingdom, went to the Moulin Rouge. La Goulue recognized the guest in the crowd and yelled he owed her a drink.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec met La Goulue through Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who sometimes asked her to pose. Toulouse-Lautrec painted numerous posters and paintings featuring the performer and even agreed to design decorations for her own dance company. The company failed miserably and almost cost La Goulue her life as she unsuccessfully attempted to perform on a stage with wild pumas.
6. Yvette Guilbert
Yvette Guilbert was a singer famous for her monologue-like songs about poverty and cheating lovers. Her songs were far removed from high-brow entertainment and were often deemed vulgar, but the public loved them. She was adored by Sigmund Freud and Bernard Shaw and gathered huge crowds at her shows. Guilbert’s key trait was the sudden contrast of her rather unremarkable appearance and provocative songs. In her later years, she suddenly switched her focus to French medieval folklore, becoming not only a performer but an expert in it. For her performances, Guilbert usually wore bright yellow or green dresses and long black gloves, which became her signature element. Toulouse-Lautrec published an entire album of Guilbert’s caricature-ish portraits. She did not like any of them but could not miss the fact that they greatly contributed to her popularity and recognition.
7. Hangover (Portrait of Suzanne Valadon)
The artist Suzanne Valadon was another close friend of Toulouse-Lautrec and partially his student. She was raised by a single mother and had to work before she reached her teens. Valadon was a successful trapeze artist until the day she fell from the top and injured her back. After recovery, her circus career was over, and she had to find another occupation; thus, she became an artist’s model. However, she was not content with her career, so she started to learn drawing and painting as she posed. Her teachers were Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Renoir, and many other accomplished artists of her time. Even their bias against women artists, typical of their era, did not stand in the way of recognizing her talent.
It was Toulouse-Lautrec who proposed Valadon would change her name from Marie-Clementine to Suzanne. Allegedly, the name originated from the Biblical story of Susanna and the Elders, in which a group of old men blackmailed Susanna to force her to have sex with them. Susanna’s honesty and purity helped her to preserve her reputation and punish her blackmailers. In art and literature, this story became a symbol of repulsive and destructive lust.
Suzanne Valadon was a known beauty, full of charm and wit. It is possible that she was romantically involved with Toulouse-Lautrec for a time. He is considered one of the possible fathers of her son, Maurice Utrillo, who later became a renowned artist in his own right.
Suzanne Valadon and Toulouse-Lautrec also shared a destructive habit of alcoholism. The most famous image of the artist shows her barely recovering from last night’s party, and it was most likely painted by a similarly hungover Toulouse-Lautrec.
