Toulouse-Lautrec: The Underbelly Artist

The National Gallery of Australia pays tribute to the great artist of Paris cabaret with the first ever major retrospective of the art of Toulouse-Lautrec in the country.
[This is archived content and may not display in the originally intended format.]

Few artworks depict fin de siècle Paris more precisely and evocatively than the works of Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa, better known as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, or, to his contemporaries, ‘The Dwarf of Montmartre’ or, more succinctly still, ‘Teapot’.

‘The fact that he was small in stature is kind of well known,’ says senior curator of the National Gallery of Australia Jane Kinsman. ‘His family had a tradition of intermarriage, so his mother and his father were cousins. It started off with some congenital problems and that has meant he had trouble with his bones, he couldn’t grow; and then he had two accidents and broke both his legs.’

Unlock Padlock Icon

Unlock this content?

Access this content and more

Leo Ribeiro
About the Author
Leo Ribeiro is an ArtsHub writer.