The Art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (24 November 1864 – 9 September 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 1800s yielded a collection of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times. Toulouse-Lautrec – along with Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin – is among the most well-known painters of the Post-Impressionist period. In a 2005 auction at Christie's auction house, a new record was set when La blanchisseuse, an early painting of a young laundress, sold for US$22.4 million.



At the Moulin Rouge was painted between 1892 and 1895. It is one of a number of works by Toulouse-Lautrec depicting the Moulin Rouge cabaret built in Paris in 1889. It portrays a group of three men and two women sitting around a table; The people at the table are (from right to left): Édouard Dujardin, dancer La Macarona, photographer Paul Secau and Maurice Guibert. The woman in the right foreground is English dancer May Milton. In the background on the right you can see La Goulue with a partner and the left background shows Lautrec himself and Gabriel Tapié de Céleyran.