Couverture pour 'Les Courtes Joies' (Cover for 'Brief Pleasures')

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 19th century allowed him to produce a collection of enticing, elegant and provocative images of the modern, sometimes decadent, affairs of those times. Toulouse-Lautrec is among the best-known painters of the Post-Impressionist period, along with Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin. His witty, biting and sometimes strangely compassionate eye make him a huge popular favourite - and can he draw! In a 2005 auction at Christie's auction house, La Blanchisseuse, his early painting of a young laundress, sold for US$22.4 million and set a new record for the artist for a price at auction.

This pair of lithographs is a delightful museum 'entry level' window into Toulouse-Lautrec. They come from a posthumous edition of 625, published by Edmond Frapier (Galéries des Peintres Graveurs) in 1925 as part of the portfolio, <em>Histoire de la lithographie de Manet à nos jour</em>, reprinting what was originally a book cover of <em>Courtes Joies</em>, comprising poems by Julien Sermet, and published  in Paris by Joubert in 1897, but with the letterpress removed in order to constitute a more overt work of art. On the original front cover of the book and right of the reprinted sheet, we see a housewife busily gutting fish - she does so left-handed but was almost certainly right-handed in the original drawing. This is a reflection of Toulouse-Lautrec's admiration of the prints of working people by his French compatriots, Honoré Daumier and Edgar Degas, and feeling for the subject matter. On the back of the book (and left of the sheet) is a minor but startling silhouetted lithograph of the unmistakable figures of Don Quixote and the ever-faithful Sancho Panza; startling because it evokes Pablo Picasso's lightning pen-wash sketch of nearly 60 years later of the same theme.

See:

British Museum, 'Couverture pour "Les Courtes Joies"', http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1399077&partId=1&sear chText=toulouse-lautrec+courtes&page=1

Wikipedia, 'Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_Toulouse-Lautrec

Dr Mark Stocker    Curator, Historical International Art    June 2018