Toulouse Lautrec - Aristide Bruant - (1897).

Artist: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa (1864-1901)
Title: Ambassadeurs, Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret.
Date of printing: 1897.
Technique: Original chromolithography

commonly known as just Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, caricaturist, and illustrator whose immersion in the colorful 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. When the Moulin Rouge cabaret opened in 1889, Toulouse-Lautrec was commissioned to produce a series of posters. His mother had left Paris and, though he had a regular income from his family, making posters offered him a living of his own. Other artists looked down on the work, but he ignored them. The cabaret reserved a seat for him and displayed his paintings. Among the well-known works that he painted for the Moulin Rouge and other Parisian nightclubs are depictions of the singer Yvette Guilbert; Aristide Bruant, the dancer Louise Weber, better known as La Goulue (The Glutton) who created the French can-can, and the much subtler dancer Jane Avril.