Toulouse Lautrec: Fact and Fancy

while his noble father shot owls from a tower and a nun prayed at the foot of his bed, a dwarf lay dying in 1901. His last words were about his father, “the old fool!” A critic who came forward after the funeral to propose that he write the dwarf’s life was challenged to a duel by the father. The family was enjoined to forget their kinsman who had been kept by destiny from the hunt and the ballroom and who had left the world 600 paintings, 300 lithographs, and countless drawings of Parisian life, of dancers, prostitutes, and singers. It would have seemed to them grotesque and infuriating for the ancient family of Toulouse-Lautrec to know that its scion Henri, tubercular, syphilitic, drunkard, arrested in growth at a child’s height, would be known as a master painter. The ironic implications of this theme provide the tone for Henri Perruchot’s new biography, the first volume of a trilogy to be called Art and Destiny: Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Manet.

The nineteenth century is an image in paint, as the century before exists in the copper engraving and ours in photography. The realist preoccupations of the century took a special form in Toulouse-Lautrec. If he is the visual counterpart of Zola and de Maupassant, he is also a student of Goya and Hokusai. His satire, like Goya’s and Hogarth’s, has compassionate roots. No romantic world fooled his sense of reality. Puvis de Chavannes, his contemporary and a “classicist” whose murals were pure enough even for the Boston Public Library, he parodied in a large canvas of pastoral vapidity and signed Pubis de Cheval.

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Guy Davenport

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while his noble father shot owls from a tower and a nun prayed at the foot of his bed, a dwarf lay dying in 1901. His last words were about his father, “the old fool!” A critic who came forward after the funeral to propose that he write the dwarf’s life was challenged to a duel by the father. The family was enjoined to forget their kinsman who had been kept by destiny from the hunt and the ballroom and who had left the world 600 paintings, 300 lithographs, and countless drawings of Parisian life, of dancers, prostitutes, and singers. It would have seemed to them grotesque and infuriating for the ancient family of Toulouse-Lautrec to know that its scion Henri, tubercular, syphilitic, drunkard, arrested in growth at a child’s height, would be known as a master painter. The ironic implications of this theme provide the tone for Henri Perruchot’s new biography, the first volume of a trilogy to be called Art and Destiny: Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Manet.

The nineteenth century is an image in paint, as the century before exists in the copper engraving and ours in photography. The realist preoccupations of the century took a special form in Toulouse-Lautrec. If he is the visual counterpart of Zola and de Maupassant, he is also a student of Goya and Hokusai. His satire, like Goya’s and Hogarth’s, has compassionate roots. No romantic world fooled his sense of reality. Puvis de Chavannes, his contemporary and a “classicist” whose murals were pure enough even for the Boston Public Library, he parodied in a large canvas of pastoral vapidity and signed Pubis de Cheval.