HENRI de Toulouse-Lautrec was a member of the aristocratic family of Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa, and the only surviving son of the Comte Alphonse de Toulouse-Lautrec.

His early years were spent on family estates near Albi, with Paris becoming his home in 1872. The victim of a genetic bone condition that made him vulnerable to fractures, he walked with a cane by age thirteen and grew to be only four feet eleven inches tall. Always of frail health, his adulthood was marred by his physical handicaps and also by alcoholism. Yet during his brief life he managed to create his own immediately recognizable style, and to evoke in his inimitable way a world full of gaiety and humor.

Lautrec was the archetypal bohemian artist of the belle époque, the last decade of the nineteenth century, when Paris flaunted its song, dance, sports, and fashion. He lived during the height of what have been called "the banquet years" of Paris - the fat years of leisure when the city and her inhabitants took up ways of behaving, thinking, playing, and perceiving that begot the twentieth century before its time.

Along with van Gogh, Lautrec is perhaps the most memorable artistic character since Rembrandt, a status recognized years ago by novelists and the film industry. Certainly his "image," in his own time and since, has contributed to the continuing stereotype of the modern artist as an antiestablishment bohemian.

An aristocrat from the country, he lived a dissolute life in the city and chose his environs as his subjects—cabarets, bars, and bordellos. These forms of popular leisure had been the subject matter of much modern painting for some time. They were also themes which Lautrec lived, and he brought to them a new objectivity, sometimes empathy, always an incisive wit. For all his rebelliousness, however, Lautrec was a serious and industrious artist, producing an enormous body of work: his well-known posters of cabaret stars, vignettes of life in the brothels, brilliant portraits of his friends, and paintings of the theater, circus, and music hall.

His career began around 1890, a time that saw the opening of the Paris World's Fair, lighted by electricity and landmarked by the just-completed Eiffel Tower (1889); the flourishing of Japonisme and interest in other non-western cultures stimulated by the fair; the opening of the Moulin Rouge (also 1889); and continuing sallies against the Academy by artists' exhibiting groups such as the Incohérents, the Indépendents, and their journalistic mouthpieces.

From this Parisian banquet of sights and ideas, Lautrec derived the primary themes of his work. He was serious about printmaking in the old tradition of the peintre-graveur, and considered it no less a part of his oeuvre than the supposedly higher art form of painting. He was remarkably open to the unorthodox types of commission that his graphic success won him, illustrating songs for music publishers, menus for friends, and theatre programs, and of course designing posters for books, journals, plays, art exhibitions, café and theatre stars, and such banal products as domestic furnishings, confetti, printing ink, and bicycle chains.As art that touched the public's everyday lives, Lautrec's posters were effectively a form of antiacademic propaganda. By taking his work to the street, he engaged in a subtle but classic form of anarchism, an act of revolt more real than the exhibitions and salons of the avant-garde ever were.

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