Toulouse-Lautrec: At the Moulin Rouge - Couverture rigide

An early and virtuoso self-portrait of a great artist: a young man is seen standing somewhat apprehensively looking into a mirror (left). The en- inventory of his feudal family home, at once costly and irrelevant, has been built up like a barricade between himself and his image - and the artist himself appears to have become part of the still-life. The light touches only his back and the nape of his neck. His face is in shadow. It is as if the young painter were reluctant to show it to the viewer or to himself, and the message is clearly one of self-doubt and scepticism: Is painting really my vocation? Will I make it? What abot my body? Why have I been so terribly cursed with withered legs and a face that grows ever more ugly, with thick red lips and a weak chin which a first growth of beard is at last beginning to give some cover to? the man who posed these questions in his painting stood on the threshold of a unique career that was to establish him among the major artists in history. His name was Henri de Tolouse-Lautrec. And he was about to make his great leap from a cloistered dynastic background to the easy-going world of Parisian pleasures.