Woman before a Mirror - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Art Print / Canvas

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) was a French Post-Impressionist painter, printmaker, and illustrator who descended from Albi's aristocracy to become the conscience of Montmartre. Trained under Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon in Paris — where he met Van Gogh and Émile Bernard — Lautrec forged a bold graphic language shaped by Japanese woodblock prints, Degas's naturalism, and Art Nouveau's sinuous line. His color lithographs for the Moulin Rouge made celebrities of dancers La Goulue and Jane Avril, while elevating advertising to high art.

Lautrec's genius lay in his ferocious empathy: cabaret performers, sex workers, and café drinkers rendered with peinture à l'essence — oil thinned on cardboard — in loose, electric strokes that stripped glamour bare and restored humanity. Works like At the Moulin Rouge, Le Lit, and the Elles series pulse with wit, tenderness, and the particular light of gas-lit Paris. In barely twenty years, before alcoholism claimed him at thirty-six, he invented the visual grammar of modern urban life. His largest collection endures at the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec in Albi.