A Toulouse-Lautrec Sketchbook

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486433776
• eBook ISBN: 9780486158365
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a superb draftsman. Possessing the extraordinary ability to memorize action, he was able to convey rapid movement in his drawings with merely a few strokes. Graphic in nature, his works — especially his sketches — are of striking originality and power. In his brief but enormously productive lifetime (he died at the age of 37), Toulouse-Lautrec created thousands of sketches. This little-known volume includes 85 of his most striking early efforts, the majority of them studies of horses.

HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

BORN ALBI, 1864
DIED CÉLEYRAN, 1901

In leafing through this sketch book one obtains the impression that the drawings are by a man of great experience and considerable maturity. Toulouse-Lautrec was born in November 1864. Two drawings in the book are dated Nice 1880. So the artist, who was in Nice in the winter and early spring of that year, was not yet sixteen years old.

The drawings in the sketch book have an appearance of uniformity of style and accomplishment which leads us to the conclusion that this book was filled with sketches within a relatively short period of time. Joyant ¹, in his authoritative work on Lautrec, dates a painting Mail Coach, Nice, 1881. This painting is closely related to a sketch at the beginning of our book. If Joyant’s dating is correct, it is possible that Lautrec used this book during two successive vacations which he spent in that fashionable resort of the international set.

Lautrec, we know, had a passion for drawing from his early childhood. His schoolbooks and notebooks were full of quick little sketches, and his early letters were often illustrated with lively drawings and caricatures. This love for drawing was further developed after two successive accidents in 1878 and 1879 when he broke the thigh bones of both legs. The process of healing was a long and painful one. We can hardly speak of a recovery as he was crippled for life. He became dwarfed.

His father, the romantic horseman, hunter and falconer, had instilled his passion for animals, particularly horses, in his son. Lautrec attended the races, frequented the stables, watched the elegant equipages roll by, observing them with a keen eye and an almost photographic mind. Our sketch book shows that these are impressions of horses and riders in quick action, rarely in an attitude of repose (as with Degas, for instance). These fleeting impressions could not be drawn from a static model : they were the quick recording of what he observed of his material in rapid movement. Thus, so early in his life, Lautrec showed an extraordinary ability t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC