Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter and printmaker, born in 1864 in Albi, in the south of France, the son of a count. He died in 1901.
His posters and paintings of Paris nightlife made his name, above all the poster he drew in 1891 for the Moulin Rouge, a dance hall at the foot of Montmartre.
His height is the other thing people know about him. His legs stopped growing in his teens while his torso reached adult size, so he stood about 151 centimeters tall, just under five feet.
Behind the cabaret posters was a harder life. Born an aristocrat, he spent his adult years among the dancers, singers and prostitutes of Paris, drank heavily and was dead at 36.
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That life began far from Montmartre. His full name was Henri-Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, and his parents were Count Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec and Adèle Tapié de Céleyran.
The boy grew up between Paris and the château of Céleyran, in the Aude. He was a fragile child: a bone disease he was born with kept him immobilized for months at a time.
During those months his father and his uncles introduced him to drawing, and it became a vocation. His teacher was René Princeteau, a painter of animals and a friend of his father.
Nobody yet knew how weak his bones were. At thirteen, in Albi, an ordinary accident was enough to show it.
A fall at Albi, another at Barèges
The accident was a fall. It happened on May 30, 1878, when he was thirteen, and it broke his left femur, the thigh bone…
What You'll Discover
Why his legs stopped growing.
Who he met in a Paris studio.
What the Moulin Rouge asked of him.
The truth about the brothels.
What he drew inside a clinic.
What may have killed him.