Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec

He arrived in Paris in 1882, at eighteen, to study in the studios of Leon Bonnat and then Fernand Cormon. Both were academic painters in the traditional sense, but Cormon's studio was a more permissive environment - it was there that Lautrec met Vincent van Gogh and Emile Bernard, artists pursuing very different ideas about what painting could do. He absorbed the lessons of Impressionism without becoming an Impressionist, and discovered in Japanese woodblock prints - ukiyo-e by Hokusai, Utamaro, and Hiroshige - a compositional logic that would define his mature work: flat planes of colour, strong silhouetted outlines, cropped frames, bold diagonal arrangements, and a frank interest in the floating world of pleasure and performance.

By the late 1880s he had settled in Montmartre, the neighbourhood north of Paris where the café-concert, the dance hall, and the cabaret had turned entertainment into a spectacle visible across the city. He became a fixture at the Moulin Rouge after it opened in 1889, at the Divan Japonais, at Aristide Bruant's cabaret, and at the brothels of the Rue des Moulins. These were not merely subjects for him; they were his world, a place where his physical appearance attracted less attention and where the social hierarchies of the aristocracy he had been born into could be set aside entirely. His close study of performers - Jane Avril, La Goulue, Yvette Guilbert, May Belfort - produced portraits of remarkable psychological weight, capturing figures not in posed moments of display but in the intervals between performances, in fatigue and habit and genuine character.

In 1891 he was commissioned to create a poster for the Moulin Rouge. "Moulin Rouge - La Goulue" was printed in an edition of approximately 3,000 copies and pasted across the walls of Paris, making Lautrec famous almost overnight. He went on to produce thirty-one large-format posters and more than 360 prints in total, a body of lithographic work whose technical sophistication - his use of spatter (crachis) for tonal gradients, his integration of lettering as a visual element, his compression of complex scenes into bold graphic shapes - transformed poster-making from a commercial craft into a form of fine art. The Elles portfolio (1896), a series of colour lithographs depicting life in Parisian brothels, remains among the most important print cycles of the nineteenth century.

He died on September 9, 1901, at the Chateau de Malrome in the Gironde, aged thirty-six, from complications of alcoholism and the physical deterioration that had accompanied it. His total output included 737 paintings, 275 watercolours, 363 prints and posters, and more than 5,000 drawings.

In Scandinavia, Lautrec's work entered significant collections early in the twentieth century. Thielska Galleriet in Stockholm, built around the collection of banker Ernest Thiel, holds one of his paintings - a Ballet Scene acquired in 1916 for 27,000 francs - as one of its most important works. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm holds further works, and mounted a major retrospective in 2008, the first comprehensive survey of his work in Sweden in forty years. At auction, Lautrec's works appear regularly at Stockholms Auktionsverk, which accounts for twelve of his thirty-nine items on Auctionist across its Magasin 5, Sickla, and Dusseldorf/Neuss locations. The French house Aguttes accounts for five further lots. Recorded Swedish market sales include a signed "Pour Toi!" lithograph at 15,000 DKK and Jane Avril at 650 SEK, reflecting the range from rare signed impressions to later exhibition reproductions. His 39 indexed lots span paintings, prints, drawings, and miscellaneous works, with the Art category covering the largest share.