The end of the year before last - the beginning of the last century wereextremely fruitful on the genius artists of painting, whose paintings today are worth millions of dollars in various auctions. To them the Frenchman Toulouse Lautrec, an artist by the grace of God, also rightly belongs. The parents of the future recognized talent came from an aristocratic family, and the boy himself was very sick in his childhood and, of course, was fond of drawing. He mostly portrayed horses and dogs, and also liked to make caricatures of people around him.
Parents were not opposed to the son engaged inart. Toulouse Lautrec (paintings of that period are almost not preserved) already in 1884 opens his own workshop in the bohemian district of Montmartre - then housing there was quite cheap. Nearby were the workshops of other well-known painters and later sculptors. I must say that the appearance of the artist was very original. His height was below 150 centimeters (but then he was not considered a dwarf, as the average height of a man in France was lower by 10 centimeters than today), his head was disproportionately huge (apparently due to childhood illnesses), and his legs - a small size.
Talented young artist Toulouse Lautrec,whose paintings have already begun to gain popularity among the admirers of art, led a very scattered way of life. By the age of 30 he was a hopeless alcoholic and fell ill with syphilis, as a result of belonging to bohemia. The attacks of white fever became more frequent, after which Lautrec was sent by the mother for treatment (1899) to a psychiatric hospital near Paris. There he spent almost three months, and when he was discharged, almost immediately took up the old one with new forces, as if he wanted to put himself in a grave as soon as possible. In 1901 he returned to the capital, completed several unfinished works. On the Atlantic coast in the same year it is broken by a stroke, and the artist dies at the age of 36 years.
For his life in art, which lasted less than20 years, the artist painted a huge number of works: more than 5,000 drawings, 363 posters and engravings, 275 watercolor sketches. Created oil paintings in the amount already 737 did not enjoy the special attention of the then critics. Among them are such as "In the Moulin Rouge", "Laundress", "Gladilitschitsa", "Portrait of Van Gogh", "Cable Dancing". True recognition came only when Toulouse Lautrec died. His paintings are valued to this day, occupying the best positions in auctions and in collections - private and museum.
