Portrait of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1841-1930)

The opening of the Moulin Rouge in October 1889 coincided with Rothenstein’s arrival in Paris. At the famous ‘moulin’ the most extraordinary character the student encountered was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. ‘A descendant of one of the noblest families in France’, Lautrec was clearly equipped to address the beau monde had he not been drawn to the ‘sinister figures’ of the famous dance floor (William Rothenstein, Men and Memories, London, 1931, p. 65). Rothenstein describes him as ‘a dwarf of Velázquez, with the genius of a Callot’, and endowed with a ‘keen intellect, he was quick to recognise intellectual gifts in others’. This quality clearly extended to the diminutive British art student whose joint exhibition with Conder in March 1892 in Père Thomas’s gallery at 43 Boulevard Malesherbes was the result of recommendations made on their behalf by the French painter. The present caricature is likely to have been made at the beginning of a friendship that lasted throughout the decade, the final recorded contact occurring in March 1899 when Lautrec was committed to Dr Sémelaigne’s clinic at Neuilly in a state of serious mental collapse.