Toulouse Lautrec

Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould head to France to take on a testing challenge - can they reverse an art world decision which one owner refuses to accept? Two sketchbooks found in a garden shed in St Emilion were given to a teenage boy, Alain, by his grandmother back in 1965. Although she never revealed where they came from, they were thought to be the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the aristocratic artist born in 1864 known for his atmospheric depictions of Parisian nightlife. Alain waited 50 years before he decided to present the sketches to the French committee responsible for authenticating the work of Toulouse-Lautrec.

Bill Weir and filmmaker Philip Bloom tell the stories of extraordinary people, places, cultures and creatures at a crossroads.

Un dossier dedicato a Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901). In sommario: Da aristocratico ad artista bohémien; I manifesti del successo; Un autore scandaloso; Gli ultimi anni. Come tutte le monografie della collana Dossier d'art, una pubblicazione agile, ricca di belle riproduzioni a colori, completa di un utile quadro cronologico e di una ricca bibliografia.

Lautrec studied with two of the most admired academic painters of the day, Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon. Lautrec's time in the studios of Bonnat and Cormon had the advantage of introducing him to the nude as a subject. At that time life-drawing of the nude was the basis of all academic art training in nineteenth-century Paris. While still a student, Lautrec began to explore Parisian nightlife, which was to provide him with his greatest inspiration, and eventually undermined his health. Lautrec was an artist able to stamp his vision of the age in which he lived upon the imagination of future generations.

The Metropolitan Museum has in its collection an exceptional body of art in a range of media by the late-nineteenth-century French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.