Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Fundamental Paintings to Understand the History of Painting
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La Toilette (1889). Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Oil on canvas. 67 cm x 54 cm
Musée d’Orsay. Paris, France
When we think of the Belle Époque (Paris, end of the 19th century), the images that come to our minds are those of cancan girl dancers, singers, prostitutes and middle-class people in the cabarets and brothels, as we have seen in paintings or posters of Toulouse-Lautrec.
We can define him as a painter, poster artist and illustrator, with great talent for drawing and a technical speed that allowed him to take advantage of spontaneity and reproduce the movement in the different scenes and characters of a frenetic world. (Unlike impressionists, Lautrec chose closed environments and with artificial light).
His clear drawings with the well-defined borders of the figures and the original frames of his works were inspired by the Japanese woodblock prints of the 18th century.
Lautrec made a caricature of a society of powerful people that pretended to despise extravagant and “vicious” environments, places they attended to in secret.
His way of achieving expressivity, body language and personality in the human figure is amazing. He did not reproduce the figure in a realistic form; he stylized or “deformed” it to achieve an expression, what is a huge legacy for the evolution of the history of painting.
And as an example, in this painting the artist achieves vitality, emotion and expressivity even in a figure with his back turned to us.
Recommended links:
Six Paintings: The Posters of Lautrec.
Six Paintings: Lautrec’s Legacy.
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