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Lot Essay
Toulouse-Lautrec was only nineteen years old when he painted Le labour dans les vignes. As Naomi Maurer writes, "with a freedom unusual for one his age, (Toulouse-Lautrec) has manipulated broad passages of paint to evoke the sensation of form with the least possible detail" (C.F. Stuckey, Toulouse-Lautrec Paintings, exh. cat., Chicago, 1979, p. 53). It is likely that the present picture was painted on the grounds of his family's estate, Château de Bosc, outside Albi.
The artistic climate of Paris in the early 1880s exposed Toulouse-Lautrec to the alternative approaches to painting put forth in the work of the Impressionists. Baudelaire had called on artists to paint scenes of contemporary life and thereby express truth and beauty in their work in his essay "The Painter of Modern Life." The high horizon line and the simplification of forms in Le labour dans les vignes is also suggestive of Japanese prints which Toulouse-Lautrec was known to admire. The brilliant intermixing of greens, blues, browns and violets captures the effect of the strong mid-day light on the vineyard and the vigorous brushwork conveys a sense of immediacy to the scene. In a letter dated 1 September 1883 Toulouse-Lautrec may have been thinking about the present painting when he wrote to Eugene Boch about his "ruminations in the sunspots of spinachy green, pistachio, olive, or earth color on my canvas'" (Letter 86).
The artistic climate of Paris in the early 1880s exposed Toulouse-Lautrec to the alternative approaches to painting put forth in the work of the Impressionists. Baudelaire had called on artists to paint scenes of contemporary life and thereby express truth and beauty in their work in his essay "The Painter of Modern Life." The high horizon line and the simplification of forms in Le labour dans les vignes is also suggestive of Japanese prints which Toulouse-Lautrec was known to admire. The brilliant intermixing of greens, blues, browns and violets captures the effect of the strong mid-day light on the vineyard and the vigorous brushwork conveys a sense of immediacy to the scene. In a letter dated 1 September 1883 Toulouse-Lautrec may have been thinking about the present painting when he wrote to Eugene Boch about his "ruminations in the sunspots of spinachy green, pistachio, olive, or earth color on my canvas'" (Letter 86).