Works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec barely left Montmartre for 20 years; he painted its dance halls and the women of the brothels in long, thin strokes, and made posters for cabarets in flat, bright shapes and bold silhouettes.

The son of a count from Albi, he broke his right thigh at 13 and his left at 14; neither healed properly, and his legs stopped growing. René Princeteau, a friend of his father, gave him informal lessons, and horses, Princeteau's speciality, turn up among his early paintings. In 1882 he joined Léon Bonnat's studio in Paris, then Fernand Cormon's, and during his five years with Cormon he met Émile Bernard and Vincent van Gogh.

The Moulin Rouge opened in 1889 and commissioned posters from him. His first, Moulin Rouge, La Goulue of 1891, went up round Paris in thousands of copies: the dancer kicks up white petticoats before black silhouettes while her partner Valentin looms grey and flat in front. His last image of Jane Avril, from 1899, makes her a black curve with a snake coiled round her dress. Prints and posters make up more than half of the works below, most from the 1890s.

His paintings often leave much of the board bare between strokes. In Quadrille at the Moulin Rouge the coat of the woman in front seems to be mostly brown board outlined in blue. Brothels gave him many subjects; In the Salon at the Rue des Moulins, painted from memory in 1894, has women sitting on red sofas, one hitching up a green stocking. Drink and syphilis wore him down, and he died at his mother's château of Malromé in 1901, aged 36.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago.