Ambroise Vollard: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

"At the Moulin Rouge, The Dance" by Toulouse-Lautrec

French art dealer, Ambroise Vollard writes: "Montmartre, the artistic quarter par excellence, attracted me and I decided to go and live there. This was about 1890. This was the Montmartre of the first Moulin Rouge, of which Bonnard painted a famous picture for me - and, of course, there were the magnificent posters that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec executed.

Given the least encouragement, Lautrec might even have developed into a great painter of frescoes, judging by the panel he executed for the booth of La Goulue, one of Montmartre's celebrities. After passing from hand to hand, it was cut in pieces by its latest purchaser, this practically-minded individual judging it to be more saleable in sections. These fragments reassembled as the result of protests by the artist's admirers, were bought for a respectable sum by the Administration of the Beaux-Arts, the same Beaux-Arts which, twenty years earlier, would have laughed Lautrec to scorn if he had begged for a wall to decorate for nothing.

The whimsicality that characterizes Lautrec's work showed in his behaviour as well. One evening I came home to find my maidservant rather worried. 'A funny little gentleman has been here,' she said, 'I told him M. Vollard was not at home, and when I asked him his name, instead of answering, he picked up a piece of charcoal that was lying about, drew a little bonhomme on the back of that canvas of M. Bonnard's, and went away.' Bonnard just then was at work on a decoration for my dining room, and on the back of one of his sketches Lautrec had left me a silhouette of himself by way of a visiting card."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Recollections of a Picture Dealer" by Ambroise Vollard.)