In the autumn of 1891 Parisians started stealing posters off walls. The Moulin Rouge had commissioned an advertisement from a twenty six year old aristocrat who drank in the place most nights, and what went up on the hoardings was flat, brutal, funny, and about eight feet tall, and people wanted it in their houses.
That is the whole story of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in one incident: a man who took a commercial format nobody respected and made it art, then died at thirty six having produced roughly thirty posters in ten years. Every one below comes from our Toulouse-Lautrec collection.
The Count Who Moved to Montmartre
He was born in 1864 into one of the oldest noble families in France, in Albi, with a title going back to Charlemagne's era and money to match. His parents were first cousins. As a teenager he broke both thigh bones roughly a year apart, and the fractures never healed properly; his legs stopped growing while the rest of him continued, and he reached adulthood at around five feet tall with a bone condition that was almost certainly genetic.
The aristocratic career was closed to him. So he took the allowance and moved to Montmartre, which in the 1880s was cheap, steep, and full of people the rest of Paris preferred not to think about. Englishman at the Moulin Rouge (1892) is what he did with the access: he drew the room he actually sat in, including the tourists.
He also studied properly. In the studio of Fernand Cormon in 1886 he met a Dutch student named Vincent van Gogh, and the two became friends; Lautrec drew his portrait in pastel the following year, and later challenged a man to a duel for insulting Van Gogh's paintings in public. Our Van Gogh guide covers the other half of that friendship. La Gitane de Richepin (1900) comes from the very end of his working life.
1891: The Poster That Changed Advertising
The Moulin Rouge had opened in 1889 and by 1891 needed a second season. The commission went to Lautrec over the established poster designer Jules Cheret, and he delivered something with no shading, no depth and no polite distance. Moulin Rouge, Preliminary Sketch (1891) shows him arriving at the solution: turn the audience into one flat black shape and let two figures carry everything.
Moulin Rouge: La Goulue (1891) is one of the most important printed images ever made. La Goulue, the greedy one, was Louise Weber, a laundress who became the highest paid entertainer in Paris. Lautrec gives her the white petticoats and the centre of the sheet, pushes her partner forward as a grey ghost, and reduces the paying customers to a black frieze. Around three thousand were printed and pasted up. People took them down and kept them.
Le Divan Japonais (1892) is the cleverest poster he made. It advertises a cabaret, and it shows neither the venue nor the act clearly. Instead Jane Avril sits in the audience in black, a critic leans in behind her, and the performer is identified by a costume detail alone. It assumes the viewer already knows everyone, which is exactly how the neighbourhood worked.
The Performers He Made Famous
Lautrec did not paint celebrities. He painted people he drank with, and they became celebrities partly because he painted them. That is a different relationship, and it shows in the work.
Jane Avril was the dancer he understood best. Nicknamed La Melinite after an explosive, she danced alone and read books between sets. Jane Avril (1893) and Jane Avril (1899) hung as a pair make one of the best two piece arrangements in this collection: same woman, same artist, six years and an entire mood apart. She also commissioned La Troupe de Mademoiselle Eglantine (1896), the wide poster at the top of this page, to sell a four woman dance troupe to London audiences. It is the only horizontal figure poster he made and the easiest of all of them to place above a sofa.
Yvette Guilbert (1894) is the great test case for whether you like him. He was not flattering. He drew a thin, angular woman with a long jaw exactly as he saw her, and she complained, and the drawings outlived every prettier portrait made of her.
Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret (1893) and Ambassadeurs: Aristide Bruant (1892) show the singer who insulted his audiences for a living and was adored for it. When the manager of the Ambassadeurs hated the poster and refused to display it properly, Bruant told him he would not go on stage until it hung in the lobby. It hung in the lobby.
Caudieux (1893) and its Caudieux Study (1893) are worth owning together, because seeing the two side by side tells you how little Lautrec changed between thinking and printing. He drew a heavy comic singer bustling on stage and left the drawing alone.
May Milton (1895) and May Belford (1895) were both English performers working Paris, and both posters are built on a single dominant colour field. They are the easiest Lautrecs to fit into a room with existing strong colour.
How the Posters Were Actually Made
Colour lithography works by drawing on a separate stone for each colour and printing them in register, one on top of the next. Lautrec used four to six stones for most posters and treated the process as a drawing medium. He invented very little technically, with one exception: he made heavy use of crachis, a spatter effect made by flicking ink off a brush across a screen, which gives his flat areas their grainy, atmospheric fizz.
La Chaine Simpson (1896) is the best demonstration of what he could do with the format, and one of the few horizontal compositions he made. Confetti (1894) is the wittiest: a poster for a confetti manufacturer in which the printing technique and the product are the same thing.
Beyond the Cabaret
By the mid 1890s the commissions were coming from further afield. The Chap Book (1896) advertised a magazine in Chicago and shows the Irish and American Bar on the rue Royale, a place Lautrec drank in constantly. Its Preliminary Drawing (1896) is the better piece of pure draughtsmanship.
The Ault & Wiborg Co. (1896) is the same commission logic. La Revue Blanche (1895) advertised the most important literary magazine in France and features Misia Natanson, the editor's wife, skating in an enormous coat.
Reine de Joie (1892) advertised a novel and caused a public row for showing a young woman kissing a fat, elderly banker across a dinner table. Elles, Frontispiece (1896) opens a portfolio about the women of the Paris brothels, drawn without either moralising or titillation, which is why it sold almost nothing at the time and is now considered among his finest work.
Why It Still Looks Modern, and How to Hang It
The reason a Lautrec still reads as contemporary is that he borrowed his grammar from Japanese woodblock prints, which were flooding into Paris in the 1880s and which he collected. Flat unmodelled colour, strong outlines, dramatic empty space, and figures cut off by the edge of the frame: all of it comes from ukiyo-e, and our Hokusai guide explains where those conventions came from. Salon des Cent (1896) advertised an international exhibition of the form, by then respectable enough to fill a gallery.
For hanging: these are graphic works, so they behave like graphic works. They want a plain wall and a simple frame, they tolerate being hung in a grid far better than oil paintings do, and three or four in a tight block along a hallway is the single best use of them. La Passagere du 54 (1896) is the calmest of the set and the right choice if you want one on its own.
Lautrec died in 1901, aged thirty six, at his mother's estate. His father signed over the contents of his studio and his mother spent the rest of her life placing the work; the museum she helped establish in his birthplace of Albi now holds the largest collection of it in the world.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many posters did Toulouse-Lautrec make?
Around thirty in total, across roughly ten years, alongside several hundred other lithographs, paintings and drawings. That small number is part of why the posters matter so much: almost every one was a considered piece of work.
How should I group Lautrec posters in a room?
They are built on flat colour and hard outlines, so they hang well in tight groups where paintings would fight. Three or four in a row along a hallway, or a block of four in a square, works better than spreading them out. Keep the frames identical and the wall plain.
Are these the original poster colours?
We print from high resolution museum open access files, so the colour follows surviving impressions. Archival pigment inks on cotton blend canvas, stretched and framed by hand in our workshop.
