Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)

Born in Albi on 24 November 1864 into a family of the high nobility of Languedoc, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec suffered at the age of fourteen two successive fractures of the femurs, which halted his growth and left him disabled, with a strange body and an unsteady gait. This physical misfortune, which he bore with constant irony, never indulging in self-pity, sharpened his eye for others and nourished a rare empathy for those whom society marginalises: dancers, circus performers, prostitutes, brasserie waitresses. It is this eye, at once sharp and tender, that makes him one of the most powerful portraitists of the late 19th century.

His training at Cormon’s studio from 1882 brought him into contact with Van Gogh, Anquetin, Bernard and Albert Grenier, who became his close friend. It was through Grenier and Lili, his wife, that he came into contact with the Villiers-sur-Morin circle. The portrait of Lili Grenier, now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, speaks of the quality of this friendship: Lili is caught in a relaxed, almost familiar pose that betrays the trust of someone who knows she is being looked at without being judged.

Toulouse-Lautrec died at the family château of Malromé, in the Gironde, on 9 September 1901, at the age of thirty-six. Alcohol and syphilis had got the better of an already fragile body. His work, posters, lithographs, paintings, remains one of the most intense testimonies to Parisian life in the Belle Époque. That this gaze also rested for a few days on the Brie, that he frequented the inn at Villiers and the friends of the circle, speaks of the vitality of those circulations of artists that make the Grand Morin valley a living place, connected to the aesthetic tensions of its time.

These notes draw on a combination of institutional, documentary and local sources: the artist directory of the Musée d’Orsay; the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP); the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT); Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs (Gründ); art market databases (Artprice, Drouot); the catalogues of the Salon des Artistes français and the Salon d’automne; the Satet-Menon collection relating to the painters of the Grand Morin valley; local sources relating to the Vallée des peintres (the commune of Villiers-sur-Morin, Coulommiers Pays de Brie Tourisme); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Madame Lili Grenier, portrait by Toulouse-Lautrec, 1888); the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka (work by Yuzō Saeki).