“When my pencil starts moving, it must be allowed its head or — bang! — nothing more happens.”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, draughtsman, and printmaker who became one of the most distinctive chroniclers of bohemian Paris in the 1890s. He was born into an aristocratic family and began drawing as a child. In his teens, he broke both legs, leaving him with permanent problems that made it difficult for him to walk. As a result, he became largely sedentary and devoted more and more of his time to drawing and painting.

He moved to Paris at the age of 17, where the cafés, cabarets, and nightlife of Montmartre became his main subjects. Toulouse-Lautrec painted dancers, singers, prostitutes, and other figures from Paris’s entertainment scene in a quick, expressive style characterized by bold fields of colour. His posters for venues such as the Moulin Rouge made him famous and helped elevate poster art into an art form in its own right. His health deteriorated during his final years, and in 1899 he withdrew to his family’s Château de Malromé. He died there in 1901, just 36 years old.