Back to Scholarship

Toulouse-Lautrec & Montmartre

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec remains one of the most popular French painters of the late 19th century, largely because his art has transmitted such a compelling image of fin-de-siècle Paris, particularly its entertainment district of Montmartre. Toulouse-Lautrec’s depictions of performers, clientele, or the anonymous figures who inhabited that nocturnal world permanently linked his name with the district’s dance halls, bars, cabarets, cafés-concerts, and bordellos. The catalog explores the work of Toulouse-Lautrec along with that of his contemporaries and the ways in which they depicted the decadent life of Montmartre in the 1890s. The more than 250 works of art included present a lively picture of the ambivalent glamour and the licit and illicit pleasures of Montmartre through use of many media, including paintings, drawings, posters, prints, and sculptures.
Relevant research areas: Western Europe, 19th Century, Lithography