Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Toulouse-Lautrec was born into one of the oldest aristocratic families in France. He broke both thigh bones as a teenager and, with a bone condition that stopped them healing properly, stopped growing at around five feet. He moved to Montmartre and drew the people there — dancers, singers, prostitutes, drinkers — as individuals rather than types.

His posters are the reason he matters here. Commercial lithography in the 1890s was a jobbing trade; he treated it as a medium, flattening figures into blocks of colour, cropping hard, letting hand-drawn lettering carry the composition. The results were designed to be read across a street, which is why they still work on a wall.

He died at thirty-six.

Biography compiled from the artist's Wikidata entity and English Wikipedia article (linked above). Work-level facts — title, date, medium, dimensions, inscriptions, provenance — come from the catalogue record of the institution holding each print, cited on the individual work. Public domain status is asserted by the holding institution; Australian copyright independently verified as life + 70 years from the artist's Wikidata death date. Wikipedia ↗