Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was born Nov. 24 1864 in Albi France was an impressionist oil painting artist who observed and documented with great psychological insight the personalities and facets of Parisian nightlife and the French world of entertainment in the 1890s. Toulouse-Lautrec is known along with Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin as one of the greatest painters of the Post-Impressionist period. He excelled at capturing people in their working environment, with the colour and the movement of the gaudy night-life present, but the glamour stripped away. Toulouse-Lautrec spent much time in brothels, where he was accepted by the prostitutes and madams to such an extent that he often moved in, and lived in a brothel for weeks at a time. An alcoholic for most of his adult life, Toulouse-Lautrec died from complications due to alcoholism and syphilis at the family estate in Malrome at the age of 36.